WordPress has tons of mature code for image editing on the admin side, but I would like to provide a form inside of a custom page template for my visitors to drag and drop, crop and save a thumbnail image as part of a new draft post. I can do the page template, form, and draft post part, but am getting pretty frustrated trying to integrate the plupload, jcrop and gd library parts. I can do bits and pieces using each of those libraries but can’t get them to play nice and it’s getting way too complicated for me.
Then it hit me: WordPress can do all that magic stuff on the admin side already (having “bundled” those common libraries), so if I can leverage those wp core functions from the front-end, I will be done. Can anyone give me an example or two on how to use those wp core media functions from inside a user-facing page template?
Please see my similar post on wp.org
There are several drag and drop WordPress themes, plugins and frameworks available. Maybe you could pick apart http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/presswork
The two key things I was missing was the realization that those javascript libs must be literally enqueued on the user-facing page that I intend to use them, and just experience on the mechanics of sending data between javascript and php by means of ajax and json.