AME 2.5 - Media Embedding for posts, sigs, vm's, groups and blogs
 

From the makers of the letters O and Yea comes the hottest 'must have mod' of the season: AME 2.5 - The Return of The Hot Mama.


AME is the multi award winning modification that smartly scans new and edited posts for URLs from a customisable variety of web sites (i.e. YouTube or Amazon or about 200 others). If it finds a match, AME will 'transform' the URL into inline embedded media without your users ever having to even think about it.

It was important for me to create a system that did not need updating (and subsequent reinstalling) every time one of the sites it supported decided to change the way it displayed its media (which is all the fricken time). Therefore I built a system in which the 'definitions' for each site could be imported, exported, tweaked and shared on a whim. This way, you only have to import the definitions that you want. It also allows the vB community to get creative and share definitions that I wouldn't of thought of!

Which sites are supported?

Included in the default installation is YouTube and Amazon. At time of posting this, I believe that there are over 180 sites supported that have been created by the vBulletin community. These range from sites that stream videos to Amazon referral links to locally hosted music and video files.

Check out the 'add ons' section of this post below to see availible add-ons.

For a total list of features and an FAQ, see click here.
For a post on troubleshooting, click here.

Though not tested on any version of vBulletin lower than 3.7.4, in theory it should work on versions 3.5 and higher (just dont quote this bit!).

Big thanks goes out to all those in the community that have supported this mod. Especially Digital Jedi who gives great support on this mod and has created over 160 definitions for this system alone! :)


Installation/Upgrade

• Upload the contents of the forums folder into your forums directory and import the product-ame.xml file into your product manager (if upgrading, choose 'yes' to overwrite previous installation).
• After installation, make sure that the system is on (admincp->AME CP->Settings)
• Then you may want to try to rebuild old URLs via the tools option.

Change Log

• 20/1/09 - Uploaded to vb.org
• 22/1/09 - v. 2.5.2. Adresses a couple minor issues and character sets
• 23/1/09 - v. 2.5.3 minor update: Fixed ksort error on import and nomedia display
• 3/2/09 - v. 2.5.4 minor update to address rare bug with some page titles
• 3/7/09 - v.2.5.5 minor updates to address rare bug editing media with brackets in name
• 9/12/09 - v.2.5.6 minor updates youtubes validation process, a ccurl bug and rebuild not using the date like a good girl

nJoy

I hate long first posts, so I thought I would reserve this one for the Features and FAQ

Features:

• Allows user to simply 'paste' in a URL (i.e. a youtube link) without needing to know any special tags. However instead of displaying just the URL, it will show the media embedded within the post
• is lightweight as it does all of her chores without the overhead of having 1 bbcode per pattern or trying to parse a post every single time it gets displayed with a bunch of patterns. AME radically reduces overhead and speeds up processing. The only time ame will kick in is after creating a new post or after editing an existing one (or if an ame tag is found)
• is extensible. She allows you to add, edit, delete, import and export patterns. That way you can decide which services to support, how they should look and then share them with others! At time of typing this, there are over 150 media sites that have been contributed by vBulletin.org members
• can extract the media title (requires your server to allow url wrappers with fetch_contents or ccurl)
• can extract embed code from sites whose URLs do not contain sufficient information to embed the video
• can rebuild your old posts to convert your 'other' mediaish tags into URL tags.
• can rebuild your old posts, blogs, comments, visitor and social group messages to convert URL tags into ame tags where needed
• can convert her codes BACK to url codes so you're not stuffed with a bunch of dead tags if you uninstall!
• won't uglify your site by having videos appear in quotes, php, code or html blocks (blech!)
• can be globally disabled
• can be excluded from forums
• can exclude usergroups
• can be toggled on/off per post, blog, comment, visitor and social group message
• would cook dinner for you if she had arms
• can wrap the output in a 'container' with original URL
• has a super comprehensive admincp help system. Yes, I actually took the bloody time to add all the info you need into vB's admincp help system. If you ask a silly question in this thread that is addressed in the help system, you will be taunted.
• is fully phrased
• has hooks around integral operations so you can extend it
• Supports embedding in vbBlog, Visitor Messages and Social Groups.
• Can be disabled in one or more of the following sections: Posts, vbBlog, Visitor Messages and/or Social Groups
• Validation ability. This will help prevent media being embedded that can not be embedded (i.e. youtube videos that the author has stipulated can not be shown off of youtube). This option requires the extraction option to be turned on and a valid validation regexp. I have included one in the default youtube version. When a video on you tube gets embedded, but the author doesnt allow embedding, a link (with icon) is shown instead.
• Ability to prevent non authorised usergroups from viewing (see Readme file in zip for more info)
• Usergroup permissions (edit usergroup to adjust edit/view permissions)
• Template driven system
• Signatures supported
• Different sizes and template configurations for each supported zone (posts, blogs, groups, visitor messages and signatures)
• A couple new hooks (Mainly to support a future add on for AME media in profiles)
• Notfication system (similar to vB's to check for errors)
• Definition keys for easier updating of definitions and to use in templates
• File caching system which radically reduces processing
• And more that I cant think of off the top of my head!

FAQ's

• Can you make me a definition for xyz? Personally, no - I just don't have the time, however there are plenty others that do (Digital Jedi being the grand champion).
• Can I use my definitions from a previous version? You should be fine with many of the definitions for AME 2.0 however many of the new features will not work until the definitions have been updated.

Troubleshooting


I keep getting 'doubled up' media or the media is all wacked out.
This is usually caused by duplicate definitions. Check you don't have duplicates. Duplicates are bad.

The video embeds fine, but when I click to start it, it says the video isn't available anymore. Yet, when I click the link, it is! What gives!?! Gief video!
This is because the publisher of the video has disallowed off site embedding. AME has a feature to help prevent this (see next point).

Media won't embed, it just gives the link with an icon after it.
This means that the publisher of the video has disallowed the video to be shown off site. Its actually a feature of AME to do that :)

I can't see me AME CP or I keep getting errors similar to:Warning: require_once([path]/includes/ame_bbcode.php) [function.require-once]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in blahblahblah

This means that you have not correctly uploaded some (or ALL) of the files in the upload/forums folder. Simply FTP ALL of the contents of the upload/forums folder into your forum directory (as the per the readme).

Here is the file structure of the package:

If you have tripple checked that the files are there are you are still getting errors, check that the server has permission to execute the files (they should really have the same owner as your other vB files)

When I finished uploading the product and saved, I got some weird "parse error".

The mod works fine. Just a heads up to you.

I am unable to find anything wrong with my forums.


EDIT: Here is the error;

http://swollencranium.com/forums/pic...&pictureid=999

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_STRING, expecting ',' or ';' in /home/radiosww/public_html/forum/vb/admincp/plugin.php(1995) : eval()'d code on line 8
Adding index to post table. Please standy by.... this bit can take a few...
Adding index to Blog and Social Groups (if needed). This could take a sec... hang on!
Adding index to Visitor Messages (if needed). This could take a sec... hang on!

I get the exact same error as above :

Thanks guys... just fixed it. It was a bug with the check to make sure files were uploaded first. It wont have affected your installs, but it also wont happen again.

Also, thanks to the lame-o who rated it 1 star. Can only assume its some disgruntled 'other media hack' coder who couldn't pull something as snazzy as this off ;)

Very nice, will install right after 3.8.

thanks for this!!! 5 stars...

edit: I cant get the product to import... get this error

It seems like you are missing some of the required AME files.
Please upload the contents of the upload/forums folder into your forums directory before installing this modification.

I have ensured that latest files are uploaded. help!

WHen I convert codes i get:

You don't have permission to access /forum/admincp/automediaembed_admin.php on this server.

Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.