Broaden the utility of Publications by incorporating fundamental layout capabilities

[LndnMdiaLb]

Publications might benefit from some very basic layout design built in to the metadata itself. One way to achieve this could be to have the content property be an array of strings instead of one string. An extra property in each item in the attachments array would indicate the position within the content that the attachment should be displayed (index of string in content array).

This would allow Lens applications to compete with mirror.xyz 's article design tools and allow users to create richer and more expressive content.

Any feedback on the idea is appreciated

[joshstevens19]

Hey you should look at this LIP this makes metadata very very flexible with ability to extend to what we wish as we keep adding

#5

Let me know thoughts on this

[LndnMdiaLb]

Yeah that's where I started but wasn't sure if the idea was practical based on current usage, integration with the wider web3 ecosystem etc. So I thought I would drop it in a discussion. How would something like this be best proposed directly on the branch?

[joshstevens19]

first, what is this supporting, blog post? because the content field supports full markdown meaning you can do a lot of stuff in it without many fields, with the new metadata each main publication focus has its own metadata and schema meaning it can grow as it needs. If you have the idea of what this should be called with basic fields then i can get a proposal in that PR if it makes sense

[LndnMdiaLb]

I suppose blog posts is the right way to describe it yes. A way to associate media attachments to a specific position within text content to create arrangements such as the below:

<p/>
<img/>
<img/>
<p/>
<video/>
<p/>

I'll take a closer look at markdown to see if I'm missing something, but the original idea was the content field is of type string[] and attachments have an additional field, say placement(?), that references a content string's index in the array to indicate what <p/> the media is associated to. May not be an ideal solution.

[joshstevens19]

yeah so with markdown you can do that style and just have the video and images within the markdown pointing to the external media items? let me know whats not possible with markdown and super happy to brainstorm how to resolve

[LndnMdiaLb]

ah ok thanks for the feedback!

[bakgwei]

Interesting proposal!