I am building a website updating tool. The user may add photographs on the page plus he can add pointers in the photographs, ie. arrows , circles or numbers to point out certain elements in the picture. I am using 'imageellipse', ' imageline' and 'imagechar' to draw these pointers. The location, the color and the other necessary variables are stored in mysql database. Now the problem is the user interface. I think I could use flash and have the user to drag an icon (for example an arrow) on to the image and send the variable indicating the location of the arrow from flash to the database using php. But I am not very experienced with flash, and especially not very experienced with using flash combined with php. So I am trying to think some other solution. Of course the user could simply write the coordinates of the arrow. This would be allright, since the tool is meant to be used by one or two persons only, and not by the viewers of the page. But writing the coordinates seems quite awkward, and I'd rather figure out a more convenient way of doing it. I played around with javascript and DHTML, but I could not come up with anything sensible. Rather I'd just stick to php, but I wonder if it is possible. Anybody got any ideas on this? If javascript and DHTML are the only possible solutions, what would be a suitable forum where I could find advice how to do it?
This is impossible to do solely in PHP because PHP doesn't work client-side. Not sure where you ran into problems with js/dhtml, but there are several libraries out there which do drag & drop. Links below go to appropriate demo pages. All listed sites have community forums. The toolman library is a little old, but really solid: http://tool-man.org/examples/dragging.html scriptaculous is popular, but takes some time to learn, especially because you also need to grok the prototype.js underpinnings: http://wiki.script.aculo.us/scriptaculous/show/Demos moo tools is another popular prototype.js-based library. I find it preferable to scriptaculous, and a little more cross-platform compatible: http://demos.mootools.net/DragDrop The Yahoo UI (yui) toolkit is my current favorite, but also takes some time to learn. I find it preferable to the scriptaculous/prototype toolkits, but that's just a matter of style and taste: http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/examples/dragdrop/dd-ontop.html Google has the google web toolkit (gwt), but I've found it buggy, laggy, and not cross-platform friendly, so I won't even link to it. Lastly, take a look at the Dynamic Drive site. It has great examples and small one-off libraries which you might find easier to implement than the monolithic toolkits: http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex11/ Hope that helps.