In the Telligent Community Server platform, you can use pinning to incorporate external URLs (including media) in a media gallery. Pinning is similar to adding a URL to the media gallery, except that it works for previously unsupported URLs.
How pinning works
When the URL is entered and it cannot be interpreted as a supported media type, Community Server uses the URL file viewer and retrieves that URL, then inspects it to retrieve title, site, and description information. It also looks for a valid, usable image in the source. All of the extracted information is then stored in Community Server. From that point on, the preview is based on this extracted data, saved locally. Periodically, the preview will be reloaded to stay up to date, but the preview is always stored in Community Server.
Thus there is no direct reference from the preview to the remote site; and Community Server isn't dependent on the remote site for keeping images because it downloads the image and stores locally to ensure that, as long as Community Server provides a link to the image, it continues to exist.
Pin content into the media gallery
- Navigate to the gallery where you want to pin the URL.
- Click New. If prompted to choose which media gallery to upload in, select the desired gallery. The upload page appears.
- Enter the URL into the File or website field. (in this example, we're using http://gizmodo.com/meanwhile-in-the-future-death-by-supernova-1714944743;.)
- Enter a title in the Name field.
- Enter text in the post body.
- Check any options you want to enable (such as emailing comments),
- Click Post. The post appears in the group's activity stream.
- When you see a message that the title and body text are displayed on the post page, click View to click through and view the original post.
Pinning Community Server URLs
When pinning URLs within the same site, the permissions of the user viewing the preview are taken into account. URLs referencing a forum thread, for example, will show the forum thread's title and excerpt with the group's logo to users with permission to read the thread.