Show Thread Enhancements - AME 2.0 -Auto Media Embedding for posts, blogs, visitor and group messsages

From the creators of French and Toast comes a sweet and sticky enchanement to the New York Times best-seller: AME - Auto Media Embedding

AME 2.0 - The Embedder Strikes Back!

AME has won Mod of the Month for Spetember 08. Thanks!

Note that 2.5 Gold has been released. Click Here.

Discussions for AME 2.5 RC 1 start here

AME 2.0 is the next version of the "Mod of the Month" winning media embedder that:

• 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 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 title (requires your server to allow url wrappers with fetch_contents)
• 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

Apart from the additional areas of support around vbBlog, Visitor Messages and Social Groups, little has changed about AME since version 1.0 released over a year ago. I cleaned up a few minor bugs, trimmed and updated the default definitions.

Which sites are supported?

At time of counting this, there are about 170 sites supported. But I have only included a few common standards as default (yahoo, youtube, myspace, google and Amazon). Why only these? AME was designed with its own import and export system that enables users to create or modify definitions and share them with the community. This keeps the system lightweight, customisable and saves us all from having to upgrade every time a media site changes their URL structure or if I add another site.

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



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.

Big thanks goes out to all those in the community that have supported this mod. Especially Digital Jedi Who has created about 155 definitions for this system alone!

Change Log


2.0.2 - fixed added slashes in quote blocks (DoH!), vm advanced error and incrimented product version. You need to replace include/ame_bb_code.php and re-import the product-ame.xml to upgrade
2.0.1 - fixed missing backslashes in code blocks

2.5 Pre-Release information

Attached to this post is pre-release of version 2.5

2.5 is a pretty major upgrade from the 2.0 series and adds the following functionality to 2.0:

• New in Beta 3 - 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 - uses templates now instead of 1 master replacement (see Readme file in zip for more info)
• 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!

Note that while previous definitions will work with the new system, they will not be sizeable by zone. Since DJ helped with the private beta testing, I am sure he will be releasing 2.5 versions of his definitions soon.

Please note that 2.5 is a pre-release so there will be issues. If you want more stability, use 2.x until this version becomes gold FWIW: The only items currently outstanding are to add some missing admincp help. The rest is working as intended as far as I can tell

nJoy

[Finger78]

Originally Posted by Digital Jedi

Show me an example of a link your using and maybe I can trouble shoot for you.

Just a standard youtube link, nothing fancy

here is an example
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xp9Gm-aRe5A

[Digital Jedi]

Originally Posted by Gladhatter

I am sure you are asking me >????

Ok
http://www.wimp.com/farylsmith

I hired the solidsnake for 50 projects so far and he has done them all beyond my wildest imaginings and perfect but says this requies some knowlege of regex and he does not have it all.

Shouldn't be a problem to make a RegEx, but that Javascript might give me some trouble. I'll let you know.

Originally Posted by Finger78

Just a standard youtube link, nothing fancy

here is an example
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xp9Gm-aRe5A

Hrm, do you still have a thread available where you tried to post this that I can look at?

[Gladhatter]

Originally Posted by Digital Jedi

Shouldn't be a problem to make a RegEx, but that Javascript might give me some trouble. I'll let you know.

Thank you DJ. The Snake man seems to know JS fine but seems to hate it to the point he nearly refused to work with it.

I appreciate the help on this one.

[Solo Drakban]

I've finally installed this mod and I love it, very nice. I just have one question, is it possible to make the AME content honor the user's image settings? Currently if a user has images off all [img] tags are reverted to URLs but any content embedded by AME remains.

[Finger78]

Originally Posted by Digital Jedi

Hrm, do you still have a thread available where you tried to post this that I can look at?

Not sure why, but it seems to work now, I didnt change any settings from last night. My only guess is that it had something to do with the quick reply feature?

Anyway, all seems ok now, thanks again.

[Digital Jedi]

Originally Posted by Solo Drakban

I've finally installed this mod and I love it, very nice. I just have one question, is it possible to make the AME content honor the user's image settings? Currently if a user has images off all [img] tags are reverted to URLs but any content embedded by AME remains.

Since it doesn't use the IMG tags, it wouldn't be affected by that setting. You could try changing the Replacement HTML for image definitions with BBCode, but I've not tried this and don't know for sure if it would work. I'm thinking it would just post BBCode as text and unparsed. Then there's the fact that this is lighter than BBCode and you'd kind of be regressing.

Originally Posted by Finger78

Not sure why, but it seems to work now, I didnt change any settings from last night. My only guess is that it had something to do with the quick reply feature?

Anyway, all seems ok now, thanks again.

Shouldn't have affected the way the link was parsed, but it's possible it had something to do with the cache.

[Solo Drakban]

Originally Posted by Digital Jedi

Since it doesn't use the IMG tags, it wouldn't be affected by that setting. You could try changing the Replacement HTML for image definitions with BBCode, but I've not tried this and don't know for sure if it would work. I'm thinking it would just post BBCode as text and unparsed. Then there's the fact that this is lighter than BBCode and you'd kind of be regressing.

I realize it doesn't use [img] tags, what I'm saying is that it should still honor that particular setting from the UserCP or add another option to disable the display of AME objects separately. There is no point in disabling images if a giant YouTube or The Onion view preview pane loads up because somebody embedded it. There should be a way for the user to disable the embedded objects just like there is a way for them to disable just able every other media tag in vB.

I haven't poked around into the AME system much yet but I assume this would be a simple matter of adding some extra logic into the code hooked into the bbcode parser.

[Preech]

I am ready to update my site to vB 3.7.5. Will this still function once my update is complete.

[Digital Jedi]

Originally Posted by Solo Drakban

I realize it doesn't use [img] tags, what I'm saying is that it should still honor that particular setting from the UserCP or add another option to disable the display of AME objects separately. There is no point in disabling images if a giant YouTube or The Onion view preview pane loads up because somebody embedded it. There should be a way for the user to disable the embedded objects just like there is a way for them to disable just able every other media tag in vB.

I haven't poked around into the AME system much yet but I assume this would be a simple matter of adding some extra logic into the code hooked into the bbcode parser.

Your wanting to block all the embedding based on a users image settings? I thought you were just referring to images. If your using AME 2.5 you can try using the conditionals to achieve that end, since the containers are template based in that version, keeping in mind the limitations of conditionals as laid out in the initial post.

Originally Posted by Preech

I am ready to update my site to vB 3.7.5. Will this still function once my update is complete.

Should be functional on all version of 3.7.

[Solo Drakban]

Originally Posted by Digital Jedi

Your wanting to block all the embedding based on a users image settings? I thought you were just referring to images. If your using AME 2.5 you can try using the conditionals to achieve that end, since the containers are template based in that version, keeping in mind the limitations of conditionals as laid out in the initial post.

Those conditionals won't work as they are cached according to the OP. Where does the magic occur for AME? I've tried poking around but there doesn't appear to be any obvious spots that it hooks into in order to do the parsing of the [ame] tags. There has to be something I can wrap an if( ->userinfo["showimages"] == true ) { } around to stop the media from embedding. Even better would be if( ->userinfo["showimages"] != true ) { do whatever to get the [url] stuff from a quote/edit } else { embed }

Edit: Hrm, I just found ame_bbcode.php and am going to start poking around in there. Previously I was just looking at the plugins and where they hooked..