Major Additions - 8WayRun.Com - Media Library

Don't forget to click INSTALL!
I'm an unemployed computer programmer... if you appreciate the work I have done on this mod, please don't hesitate in offering me a donation by clicking the "Support Developer" link to the right of this text. A donation of $50 or more automatically gives you the right to remove the copyright footer for this modification from a single forum.

This is a new modification, spawning from the old VB 3.x Video Directory modifications.
For all intents and purposes, both my old Video Directory Remixed mod, and Survivor's original Video Directory mod have been discontinued. Neither of us are maintaining these older versions, they will not receive any future updates and we will not be providing any support. This version has a new name because it has been completely rewritten from scratch and is not being built on Survivor's old code. Because of this, if you are upgrading to this new version, from the old version, be sure to read this entire post in order to understand the upgrade process.

What is this mod?
Simply put, this mod is a directory for media. It supports URL inputs, in order to extract meta data and directorize media into a simple and easy to understand library. Users can add their favorite media from a select few online distribution centers (such as Youtube or Vimeo) and categorize and tag them as they see fit. This mod offers rudimentary support for the hosting of local media. An administrator can upload a media to the /customVID/ (default) directory; then add the media to the library using the URL code of "local:filename". Media hosted locally will be displayed using JWPlayer, but will not provide meta data, so that kind of information will need to be entered manually.

Demo:

http://www.8wayrun.com/media.php

Features:

• Integrated directly into the vBulletin user database and product manager.
• Fully phrased and built on tempaltes for easy re-skinning and styling.
• Simple to use administration features and usergroup permission settings.
• Landing page with the most recent, most popular and highest rated media.
• Ability to add media into a single category, while adding multiple tags.
• Ability to browse media through categories, tags, and user contributions.
• Summary tag cloud with a link to the entire list of tags in the system.
• Comment and rating system based on AJAX including graceful degredation.
• Individual RSS Feeds for newest videos, categories, tags and user media.
• Search function for titles and descriptions.

Installation:

If you are upgrading from before version 1.1, please install that version first.

1. Upload all the files in the "upload" directory of the attached zip file to your forum root.
2. CHMOD the /customVID/thumbs/ directory to full read/write/execute 777 permissions.
3. CHMOD the /customVID/sitemap/ directory to full read/write/execute 777 permissions.
4. Import the product file called "product-medialibrary.xml" in the Product Manager of vBulletin.
5. Set your usergroup permissions and media library settings in your administration control panel.
6. OPTIONAL: Enable the "Generate XML Media Sitemap" scheduled task in your administration control panel.
   
   NOTES: Make sure you decide what you wish to use for your thumbnail quality setting. By default, thumbnails are saved at 50% quality. At 50%, thumbnails will only be 2kb in size, but at the expense of quality. At 100%, thumbnails will be about 15kb in size, but will have the highest quality. I recommend setting it to 80%, which would leave thumbnails at 5kb in size with still excellent quality.
   
   Every time you change your thumbnail quality setting, you will need to run the "Rebuild Media Thumbnails" to see any changes.

Upgrading from VDR:

1. The "video*" tables from your previous installation of VDR need to exist in your database.
2. Enable the "media ADMIN import" plugin in the plugin manager of your control panel.
3. Run the "Import Media from VDR" process in your update counters menu in maintenance.
4. Disable the "media ADMIN import" plugin in the plugin manager of your control panel.
5. Run the "Rebuild Media Thumbnails" process in your update counters menu in maintenance.
6. You may now uninstall VDR once you confirm everything has been imported as intended.
   
   NOTES: You will mostly likely get at least one error while rebuilding media thumbnails...
   
   When you get an error, click the details link for that media. If the media displays some sort of error such as "This video has been removed" or "This video no longer exist", then that means that media is gone and you'll be unable to generate a thumbnail for that particular media. Use the available options on that media's detail page to DELETE it from your library. Then go back to your browser window which is rebuilding thumbnails and click the "retry from this position" link.
   
   If you got an error for a media, but after clicking the details link you can find no obvious error with the video; then the error could have just been a simple syn/ack failure. Just click the "retry from this position" link and the system will try to rebuild that thumbnail again.

Known Bugs:

There is a conflict with this modification and some of Valter's VSA modifications that will prevent navbar permissions from being handled correctly. I don't know exactly who's fault it is; but I'm pretty sure there are no errors in my code that would be causing this problem. There is a work around for this however.

Admin Control Panel > Plugins & Products > Plugin Manager > "media NAVTAB"

Find the code:

    $perms = media_permissions();

Replace with:

$perms['rate'] = true;
$perms['comment'] = true;
$perms['submit'] = true;
$perms['playlist'] = true;
 
if (is_member_of($vbulletin->userinfo, explode(',','5,6')))
{
    $perms['modtags'] = true;
    $perms['modcategory'] = true;
    $perms['modservice'] = true;
}

[Jaxel]

Originally Posted by Big-Pete

Love this mod, Just what I needed, Will be sending donation as this is superb!..

The only issue I have is with the CMS, If i use the BB code and place the media tag into an article in the cms i get a border appear around title in both the preview and the full page, how would i either adjust this border or remove it?? Any help will be greatly appreciated

bbcode is handled by the template: 8WR_media_bbcode

Feel free to edit it as you wish.

[DragonByte Tech]

Originally Posted by Jaxel

I'm already using that...

if ($ajax)
{
	$message = convert_urlencoded_unicode($message);
}

You misunderstand, I meant in the JS file.

If you wrap PHP.urlencode() around

fetch_object('vB_Editor_QR_textarea').value

it will work, as the screenshots demonstrate.

I don't know what charset you use on your development board since you say it works for you without PHP.urlencode(), but French and Norwegian characters are included in the ISO-8859-1 encoding so they don't require UTF-8 to work.

Hope that helps


Fillip

[DragonByte Tech]

Originally Posted by Jaxel

I also personally feel that using checks like "function_exists()" is a big mistake. I think a program should either DEGRADE gracefully and silently without the user knowing, or FAIL as loud as possible. If you start using "function_exists()", the program doesn't degrade as it should, it instead FAILS, but it doesn't tell anybody it fails; no one knows it failed until things just don't work as it should. Error messages are there for a reason, to inform you that there was an error.

No offence, but I must disagree quite strongly with this.

Wrapping function_exists() around your function declaration (which I have already empirically proven will cause errors in specific scenarios through no fault in anybody's code) simply means that if the function exists, the code will continue to work 100% as intended with no degradation or ill effects whatsoever.

The only specific scenario where having a re-declare message would be beneficial is if two mods attempted to use the same function name, which should never happen because all mods should name their functions in such a way that it's uniquely tied to their mod.

So yeah, I don't find a single reason why a function declaration that's happening in a place that may very well be executed multiple times should not be wrapped in function_exists().
Alternatively, it would be possible to put the function declaration in a file of its own, and then use require_once().
It'd have the same effect, more or less


Fillip

[Jaxel]

Originally Posted by DragonByte Tech

You misunderstand, I meant in the JS file.

If you wrap PHP.urlencode() around

fetch_object('vB_Editor_QR_textarea').value

it will work, as the screenshots demonstrate.

I don't know what charset you use on your development board since you say it works for you without PHP.urlencode(), but French and Norwegian characters are included in the ISO-8859-1 encoding so they don't require UTF-8 to work.

Hope that helps


Fillip

I've found hundreds of websites all discussing the issue of urlencoding in JavaScript and how there is no real match to the PHP function. They all go into these long winded functions in order to fix the problem, talking about issues of escaping etc... and not ONE of them mentions this PHP.urlencode function. In fact, I can't even find any documentation on the internet that this function exists... which is bizarre, since it clearly works. PHP and JavaScript can't even be used at the same time because PHP is server side and JavaScript is client side. So in order for this function to work, it has to exist in JavaScript. So I guess my next question is, WHY? Why do none of these other articles mention this function? What is the downside? Is there a performance issue? Backwards compatibility? It seems like such a simple fix, while escape() just creates more problems...

BTW, I use UTF-8... and many of the people who've I've convinced to switch to UTF-8 have all reported to me that their forums are faster than ever... I just recently had shoryuken.com switch over and even their users are happy about it.

[DragonByte Tech]

Originally Posted by Jaxel

I've found hundreds of websites all discussing the issue of urlencoding in JavaScript and how there is no real match to the PHP function. They all go into these long winded functions in order to fix the problem, talking about issues of escaping etc... and not ONE of them mentions this PHP.urlencode function. In fact, I can't even find any documentation on the internet that this function exists... which is bizarre, since it clearly works. PHP and JavaScript can't even be used at the same time because PHP is server side and JavaScript is client side. So in order for this function to work, it has to exist in JavaScript. So I guess my next question is, WHY? Why do none of these other articles mention this function? What is the downside? Is there a performance issue? Backwards compatibility? It seems like such a simple fix, while escape() just creates more problems...

It's a function vBulletin creates in their JS files, to solve just the problems you mention

There's no downsides that I'm aware of.

Originally Posted by Jaxel

BTW, I use UTF-8... and many of the people who've I've convinced to switch to UTF-8 have all reported to me that their forums are faster than ever... I just recently had shoryuken.com switch over and even their users are happy about it.

vBulletin itself isn't 100% UTF-8 compatible, though.
I can't comment on speed increases, never tried it tbh.

At any rate, it shouldn't be necessary to make them switch when it can work via that simple function, no?


Fillip

[Jaxel]

Originally Posted by DragonByte Tech

It's a function vBulletin creates in their JS files, to solve just the problems you mention

There's no downsides that I'm aware of.

vBulletin itself isn't 100% UTF-8 compatible, though.
I can't comment on speed increases, never tried it tbh.

At any rate, it shouldn't be necessary to make them switch when it can work via that simple function, no?


Fillip

Ah... well that explains it, thanks. As for UTF-8, there actually is a reason to use it with this mod. This mod pulls in XML data from external sources, and UTF-8 is the first and foremost supported character set for the XML standard. I guess I'll just set this mod to force UTF-8 on the XML queries, instead of pulling in vbulletin's charset.

[DragonByte Tech]

Originally Posted by Jaxel

Ah... well that explains it, thanks.

No prob, glad to be of help

Originally Posted by Jaxel

As for UTF-8, there actually is a reason to use it with this mod. This mod pulls in XML data from external sources, and UTF-8 is the first and foremost supported character set for the XML standard. I guess I'll just set this mod to force UTF-8 on the XML queries, instead of pulling in vbulletin's charset.

That makes sense I guess, though I believe (but I may very well be mistaken) that vBulletin's XML parser handles differences in encoding.

If only the entire interwebs ran off of utf-8...


Fillip

[Big-Pete]

Originally Posted by Jaxel

bbcode is handled by the template: 8WR_media_bbcode

Feel free to edit it as you wish.

Ok Thanks, Being that i'm by no means a coder, how should I edit it though? All I see in the template are padding settings, Is that border supposed to be like that as Im getting the border in all styles, especially vb4's default..

PHP Code:

<div class="bbcode_container">
    <div class="bbcode_quote">
        <div class="quote_container" style="padding: 10px; text-align: center;">
            <vb:if condition="$error">
                {vb:var error}
            <vb:else />
                <div style="padding-bottom: 10px;"><b><a href="{vb:var media.href}">{vb:raw media.title}</a></b></div>
                {vb:raw media.embed}
                <div style="padding-top: 10px;"><a href="{vb:var media.href}">{vb:var media.href}</a></div>
            </vb:if>
        </div>
    </div>
</div 


>

[Footman]

Unfortunately I'm experiencing this error again, and I thought it was fixed a couple of days ago. When I click on the thumb to view the video all I get is the title and not the player. I do have the latest version uploaded, had this issue before and clicked the "Click here to restore all services in the "/media/xml" directory to their default settings." and it fixed it before. Now - nothing

I don't know where to start to figure it out. Any thoughts?

[patrick91]

have problems with it??

Database error in vBulletin 4.0.3:

Invalid SQL:
INSERT INTO media_service
(svcName, svcRegex, svcURL, svcFeed, svcValue2, svcThumb, svcTitle, svcDesc, svcLength, svcTags, svcMovie, svcWidth, svcHeight)
VALUES
('YouTube', 'http:\\/\\/[a-z]*?[\\.]?youtube\\.[a-z]*?\\/watch\\?v=([\\w_-]*)', 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v={serviceVAL}', 'http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos/{serviceVAL}', 'null', '$arr[\'media:group\'][\'media:thumbnail\'][3][\'url\']', '$arr[\'media:group\'][\'media:title\'][\'value\']', '$arr[\'media:group\'][\'media:description\'][\'value\']', '$arr[\'media:group\'][\'yt:duration\'][\'seconds\']', '$arr[\'media:group\'][\'media:keywords\']', 'http://www.youtube.com/v/{serviceVAL}?autoplay={ap10}&hd=1&fs=1', 640, 385);

MySQL Error : Unknown column 'svcMovie' in 'field list'
Error Number : 1054

I installed it first time good but then had problem with the permissions i uninstalled it and now want try it again and get that #$@^$%#& error...:P i'm such a noob but sucks if you not know what to do?

Gr,

patrick