Hello, apologies for English only, I’m from Australia!
I’m very impressed by Tainacan and run an archival website with many different item types. One key item type is Newspaper or Magazine articles. Before Tainacan, I used to have these as a standard Wordpress Post, with the scanned materials from the original source as attached thumbnail images.
I was hoping to leverage Tainacan for these items, using the “Document” type, however this appears to be plain text only, so I cannot format the articles with Header font, paragraphs etc like they were in a Wordpress post.
Is there any way to achieve this goal of having a visually pleasing Text item that displays more like a Wordpress Post, but with the attached metadata, filtering and scanned originals of a Tainacan Item?
So what you are asking is a bit what this issue might be able to solve in the future:
And to a a certain point, that might also be complemented by this one:
We don’t have a clear notion of when will it enter our roadmap, but the way I see is that textarea metadata type might be a good place to accept basic formatting options. The disadvantage is that for plain search this will start including more and more HTML content in the database.
However even when that is available, there is a line between styled-open-content and more structured data, which is the main goal in Tainacan. Currently some folks are working this in a middle ground alternative:
Have one post type (or your default posts) still store the more open-gutengerg-editable content.
Have one collection store the structured data part (metadata, file document, attachments).
In the post content, use Tainacan blocks such as the Item Metadata Sections and the Item Media Gallery to pull that structured data from the Tainacan content.
You can still offer filtering to the structured part. And you can help reinforce the relation between the two types of content by putting a link to the post in one of the URL-type metadata or even in the Document as Link.
It is not ideal, I know, but is a way that I can see while these features are not available.
Thank you for your response Mateus. This is very interesting and whilst it doesn’t immediately resolve my issue there is some hope that a similar feature will be there in the future. I appreciate your time and knowledge.
