OK...
For anybody who wants to know.... one of the major difficulties in implementing the internal image browser in the rich editor is the fact that a "virtual name" (the name that the image USED to be known as, eg. sitelogo.jpg ) is placed in the text field when inserting an image in the respective content part creation, this is for user-friendliness.
During the rendering of the page, a complex substitution process of the virtual name occurs and the REAL name is placed there instead, which would look something like 1_2_uGaT0P45bv-340x.jpg.
Since no substitution seems to take place when rendering rich content a solid understanding of the substitution mechanism is required (Oliver? help!) .... for which i haven't the time.
However, i'm changing tack.... this weekend i'm going to try and write a "Plug-in" that will use the equivalent SQL queries to extract the images, thumbnails and REAL names from the database according to the access control privileges, create a list which will display the thumbnails, and upon selecting the thumbnail, deposit the REAL name and relative path in the text field of the image selection box. If anybody has got any insights they might enlighten me with i'll be mighty grateful!
I will be testing this with htmlArea as it's a lot easier to work with, but once the plug-in is complete, it shouldn't be too difficult for some bright javascript spark to implement it in FCKeditor.
All, please bear in mind phpwcms will be front ending a very real intranet project (schedules, deadlines... all that bulls**t...), so if i can't get this mechanism working within a day or so, i'm just going to take a "tough!" stance with my users on the internal image browser, but anyone else will be welcome to my notes & code snippets if they're willing to carry on the good work!
Cheers,
Shrike71