As it's a feature I funded and requested - I guess I can explain it.

We have a number of stock images that we like to reuse in our articles.  this might be like a company logo or product image, etc.  We add these to webgui as assets and then link them in in articles when we want them.  This works great, except it has some faults. 

Currently, when you use the rich text editor in webgui and add an image from webgui - it uses the /uploads/xxx/yyy/image.jpg location for the image.  This is nice and fast, but has a side effect - it means that it points to the location of the image directly, and not the asset.  This means if the asset itself changes (ie. you revise the product image and upload a new one, or change it in any way, then a new revision of that image is created and it's given another /uploads/xxx/yyy/ location.

Because the rich text editor inserts a link directly to the old asset - this means that it DOES NOT CHANGE!

Great if that's what you want, but if you have hundreds of pages with your logo on them and you want them to all update - well.. you're SOL.  Hence this feature request.  It (imho) fixes the rich text editor so that it instead links images via their asset url's.  this means any changes made to those images are automatically felt throughout any other pages that use that image.

It does have a hit on performance, as it means every image so linked has to be redirected from the asset url to the right /uploads/xxx/yyy/ location, but imho that's a minor issue to getting it to work how it should. :)

Make sense now? :) 

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--- (Edited on 28-September-2006 4:36 pm [GMT+0800] by Jesse) ---