A client of ours recently contacted us asking for a way to crowdsource some information about images in a new collection. We put our heads together and came up with a way to reconfigure LUNA’s Buy button functionality to do just that.
Technically speaking
The Buy button was developed as a feature in the LUNA software to allow institutions to sell prints of their images. When you click the Buy button in LUNA, it launches a predefined URL that is set up in advance by the administrator of the collection. Along with the base URL, you can also pass various information related to the image you are looking at such as field data, image URL’s, etc. Since the Buy button was designed to be very flexible and not just do one thing, it’s possible to configure it to pass that same type of information to any web page or form for an end user to make use of.
The idea
By investing in a little development magic, a user will be able to click on the reconfigured Buy button at the top of the page in the LUNA Viewer’s Detail View. This action will take the user to a web form where they will be able to fill in information about the image.
What to expect
In the upcoming release of LUNA 7.1.5 we'll integrate this new idea into the Collection Manager so you can define the text that the Buy button uses for each collection independently to suit your own particular needs.