CUNY Academic Commons

Just wanted to note that this is still an issue and that I think it's important; not having flexibility makes it harder to keep the homepage dynamic. Case in point: I wanted to feature a blog today, but didn't because it just looks too incongruous to have one person's photo next to a group blog (see attached screenshot)

Here are two ways to deal with this that make sense to me:

1. Allow the admin editing the widget upload a photo or point to one via URL
2. Show images from that particular blog's media gallery as options and allow the admin to choose one of them.

I know that this isn't the sexiest thing on our list, but I would love to be able to feature blogs more often.

In https://github.com/castiron/cac/commit/c9b8adc5e5a6a6cc69b9d96627e4f211bf565ab6 I added the ability for admins to specify an image URL for featured blogs and featured blog posts. A few notes:
- In order to make this work, I had to hack up the plugin and the TimThumb library in ways that are not secure for distribution, which means that we're now running a fork of the plugin. I have attached a diff file (cac-featured-content-1134) which can be reapplied to our local version when we need to make other changes. (The workaround for this - assuming there is one - would take me many, many hours, and doesn't really seem worth it at the moment.)
- You'll see the new Image URL fields for all content types, but they only work for Blogs, Posts, and Resources. If you enter an image for a Group or Member, nothing will happen - it'll fall back on the avatar.
- The logic for auto-selecting images (#773) is still in place as the fallback. Leave the URL field blank, and the plugin will behave as it currently does.