I’ve begun using django-filer to manage site assets after years of trying to beat a square peg (django-filebrowser) through a round hole (everything else). It’s been a very rewarding transition.

Part of the addiction to filebrowser was due to its integration with django-tinymce. A long time ago, the maker of django-tinymce added a hook+widget for django-filebrowser and users have been complaining ever since. Despite its shortcomings, though, people such as myself have continued using it because of the “this is the only way I can add images to my editor without uploading them somewhere else” mentality.

Recently, however, django-tinymce and I have gone our separate ways leaving me with the freedom to choose a new editor, and a new way to manage media. Enter django-filer.

Django-filer is a great alternative to django-filebrowser featuring a cleaner interface and plenty of extra bells an whistles. I now use it to upload my assets before writing a blog. The hard part, I found, was getting the URL of uploaded assets. I decided to fork the project and add a copy-to-clipboard function using the zClip library.

zClip allows you to set up an event hook on any HTML element that copies given text to the clipboard by overlaying the element with a Flash movie.

In this case, I used a span container for positioning, and then a nested span element to act as the widget:

<span style="position:relative">
    <span class="zclip" data-copy="{{ file.url }}"></span>
</span>

Activating the widget is accomplished by adding a simple jQuery snippet in the <head>.

$(document).ready(function() {
$('span.zclip').zclip({
    path: "flash/ZeroClipboard.swf",
    copy: function() {
            return $(this).attr('data-copy');
    },
    afterCopy: function() {
            $(this).fadeOut(100, function() {
                $(this).show();
            }
    }
});
});

To make it work properly I had to add some CSS:

span.zclip {
    position: absolute;
    top: 0;
    left: 0;
    width: 16px;
    height: 16px;
    background: url('../img/clip.png') no-repeat;
}

Voila, I can quickly upload images and grab the URL making the disconnect from filebrowser even less bothersome: Screenshot of copy to clipboard