Yesterday I wrote a simple and short article on publishing to WordPress from Openoffice. The results were agreeable and the translation from Openoffice to HTML could be called decent. Today I would like to write a more complex article and see how this comes out.
Integrating media from within Openoffice
What we saw yesterday was that embedding an MP3 file in the Openoffice document did not work so well. Once inserted into the OO document, the MP3 file showed up as a large icon inside OO and nothing useful could be done with it, in fact it even made it more difficult to edit the OO document than it was to edit the article on the web after I published it to WordPress.
Photographs
Embedding pictures from the local file system into OO is easy but besides embedding pictures from a scanner it is also the only way to insert pictures. There is no way to insert a picture using a URL through the ‘Insert → Picture’ menu option.
Continuing to edit below the inserted picture is also easy. There are also some nice photo editting gadgets in Openoffice, the picture below was first aged by 10% and then solarized, which took just a few seconds to find and to execute.
I’m very interested to see what the end result is when I publish this to WordPress as it turned out yesterday that the embedded MP3 did not appear to have become a part of the final document. Somehow the OO publishing plugin needs to convert the above picture to media for WordPress and that’s where things often go wrong in any tool.
Movies
Something I have not tried yet is to embed movies into a document. I’ll start off with trying to embed a very short MPEG clip of my son sliding over the ice last winter. This time I will not use the ‘Insert → Movie and Sound’ menu option but instead I will use the ‘Insert → Object → Video’ menu option.
Again the result is horrible. All I see is a grey square that isn’t bothered by any page margins. It is difficult to position the cursor in a logical place as OO does not appear to realize that something has just been added to the document.
The position of the embedded object cannot be altered, in fact the object can not even be removed nor selected anymore. While OO does not seem aware of the object any longer, at first typing through results in text showing up in a VERY narrow column next to the grey square while an overflow of the text suddenly results in the object being pushed down to the next page and the column to be reformatted into the latter two paragraphs.
[[Continued editting from within WordPress]]
I have again, like yesterday, continued editting this article through the WordPress editor. As readers can see, the picture effort worked nicely and Openoffice apparently had no trouble converting the modified in-document picture to a media bit WordPress understands. While this almost sounds like a victory, we have to consider that all we’re trying to do here is to add a picture to a document!! Cheering over such a trivial bit certainly shows the extent of the drama doesn’t it?
While the embedded MPEG above shows like a grey square in OO as well as in the article view, in WordPress’ editor it looks like a yellow square with a small ‘F’ icon in it. It is possible to modify the size of the yellow square but no additional menu is given. Clicking on the ‘Movie’ menu in the wordpress editor however reveals some properties of the embedded object; It is indeed recognized by WordPress as a movie (Flash movie) but the file/URL of the movie is set to /home/fredl/dvgrab-001.mpg. It would seem that Sun Microsystems actually charges money for the Openoffice publishing extension. How they van even ask money for an extension that leaves the filesystem path of embedded media unaltered when publishing to a website is a great mystery to me.
Integrating Media from within WordPress
So while we’ve found out that adding simple media from within OO, aside from the really simple pictures, is a rather daunting task (I’m sure it can be done somehow, through difficult engineering instructions, but I am testing whether it’s easy and straightforward to do; it is not!), let’s try if it’s any easier from WordPress.
I have not found embedding pictures in WordPress to be very easy to do either. The collection of icons I’m using on the frontpage are icons I first downloaded from a public domain icon site. After that I had to upload these icons as media to WordPress, remember the URL that was assigned to them and in a field that was there by the virtua of the wonderfull WordPress theme I was able to cut and paste this icon’s URL such that it shows up as an icon on the frontpage. I mean… come on! It’s doable and it’s a rather straightforward procedure but it’s so time consuming. Every new article I make I have to search through my media, click on the icon I want to use, cut the media URL and paste this after opening the document I want to give something as trivial as an icon on the frontpage.
Lots of people seem to love WordPress and it’s certainly an improvement over editting raw HTML, but seriously folks, if you cannot make something as trivial as adding an icon to an article a point – click – ok action then you’re missing the point of publishing articles; it has to be easy and straightforward so the author can focus on the contents instead of wasting lots of time over the trivial stuff.
Embedding a movie in the article through using the WordPress editor
Adding a movie clip to the article through the WordPress editor is more tedious than doing it through OO. I first had to upload the movie fragment to the WordPress media using another tab while I’m writing this article. After doing so, we need to go through the same hoops to cut and paste the URL of the media:
This time this results in the above (from within the editor) yellow square. However, this time it’s detected as a Quicktime movie. Both the earlier flash detection and the quicktime detection are incorrect as it’s a very simple and straightforward MPEG movie fragment of a few seconds only.
I’m getting curious to see if I can play this clip so I’ll do an intermediate publish. Previewing the article resulted in seeing a thumbnail and player controls inside the article. Wow, we’re getting somewhere here! Well forget it, as for me it does not play anything. Well…. who knows, perhaps the Gods of the WordPress feel that my embedded movie clip is too small to play? So let’s try a somewhat larger movie clip.
Oh… wait..
This file is too big. Your php.ini upload_max_filesize is 2M.
Yes, I know I can modify this setting. It is easy for me to do because it’s also my daytime job to know these kinds of things. But what about an author just wanting to embed a short movie clip into their article? Anyway, I increaded the upload_max_filesys parameter and saved this article before restarting Apache. Brilliant!
This file is too big. Your php.ini upload_max_filesize is 1000M.
