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

[Gladhatter]

Originally Posted by smirkley

Rebuild
Convert (or remove) AME code in your old posts, vbBlogs, group messages, visitor messages or signatures.

...with the underlined phrases being linked to the particular rebuild tool.

and stupid Gladhatter ask here only if you have checked those links to see if they all point to same place or differnt one?

And edits post to say they are all differnet as I just checked.

[Digital Jedi]

Originally Posted by smirkley

But in the v2.5 that I recently downloaded a couple of days ago there is,..

In the AME admin cp > tools page,..this is what I have at the very top...



...with the underlined phrases being linked to the particular rebuild tool.

I am not sure I follow you, or that we are talking about the same feature version of AME at this point.

Thanks again

Hrm, looks like I didn't have that for some reason. I believe I had a development version The Geek had sent me a while back still installed. Okay, my fault. Let's see, did you run these in test and verbose mod first and not run into any problems?

[smirkley]

Originally Posted by Digital Jedi

Hrm, looks like I didn't have that for some reason. I believe I had a development version The Geek had sent me a while back still installed. Okay, my fault. Let's see, did you run these in test and verbose mod first and not run into any problems?

The fault shows up in test or not test.

vbBlogs produce:

Fatal error: Call to a member function hide_errors() on a non-object in /home/xxxxxxxx/public_html/admincp/automediaembed_admin.php on line 70

Group messages produce:

Fatal error: Call to a member function hide_errors() on a non-object in /home/xxxxxxxx/public_html/admincp/automediaembed_admin.php on line 90

Visitor messages produce:

Fatal error: Call to a member function hide_errors() on a non-object in /home/xxxxxxxx/public_html/admincp/automediaembed_admin.php on line 111

Signatures produce:

Database error in vBulletin 3.8.0:

Invalid SQL:
SELECT count(userid) total FROM usertextfield WHERE 1=1 AND (signature LIKE '%[/url]%' OR signature LIKE '%[/ame]%' OR pagetext LIKE '%[/nomedia]%');

MySQL Error : Unknown column 'pagetext' in 'where clause'
Error Number : 1054
Request Date : Friday, January 16th 2009 @ 11:23:34 PM
Error Date : Friday, January 16th 2009 @ 11:23:34 PM
Script : http://www.xxxxxxxxxxxx.com/admincp/...ds=10&zone=sig
Referrer : http://www.xxxxxxxxxxxxxx.com/adminc...build&zone=sig
IP Address : xxxxxxxxxxxx
Username : xxxxxxxxx
Classname : vB_Database
MySQL Version : 5.0.67-community-log

posts produce expected results as explained above.

xxxxxxxxxxx replace domain name but replaced for the purpose of this post

[Digital Jedi]

Hrm, I would try reinstalling AME again, as you seem to be getting errors on the check to see if everything is installed. Re-upload the files and then reinstall AME the same way you would do as if doing an upgrade and see if it inserts the proper tables this time. Remember that your definitions will be reset to the default set.

[smirkley]

OK, did a full reinstall, and same end result.

I dont think the install is the issue atm.

[Nadeemjp]

this is a wonderful modification.
i was just wondering if it is possible to launch this officially in 3.8 as well so that i dont have to come in here again.

it is working though with 3.8 @ my forums.

[Digital Jedi]

Originally Posted by smirkley

OK, did a full reinstall, and same end result.

I dont think the install is the issue atm.

I've seen this error once before, but it wasn't corrected publicly in this thread. So I'm not sure if they found a solution. The only thing I can think of at this point is that you've got a conflicting modification or the remnants of one. Have tried disabling all your modifications one by one to see if anything changes?

Originally Posted by Nadeemjp

this is a wonderful modification.
i was just wondering if it is possible to launch this officially in 3.8 as well so that i dont have to come in here again.

it is working though with 3.8 @ my forums.

It just depends on when The Geek has time to come back to the forums again.

[Gladhatter]

I hope to take time to learn the regex libs soon if it is in my grasp as I have found that the few sites I find or are sent to me are not suitable for it yet.

[The Geek]

Originally Posted by smirkley

OK, did a full reinstall, and same end result.

I dont think the install is the issue atm.

Let me first start by apologising for my sporadic attendance here, however my rl zaps most of my free time now and I have less time to code and/or support this project. Let me then follow up by again thanking DJ for his tireless support of this mod. If it wasn't for his support, I am sure most would agree that this mod would be as dead as a doornail (whatever the hell a dead doornail is).

Smirkley, I do seem to recall that the last 2.5 release had an issue with conversions of old blogs, social group and visitor messages. IIRC, I think I had it resolved on a local development build, however I am not keen to simply zip up what is on my dev server without really spending the time to comb back through the code to ensure there are not any loose ends left undone (its been months since I have worked on it).

The problem was that the tool would give a db error trying to do conversions of old data and no changes would be made. It in no way affected the underlying data (but of course it wouldn't convert old info into ame's either!). The rest of the system works hunky dory. New visitor messages, blog posts, etc... worked fine... (as well as edited ones) just not the conversions of old data using that particular tool.

I will try to set some time aside over the next week or so to comb back through the code and see if I can get a final release into the 3.8 forum (yes, this indeed works on 3.8). Until then, know that the system works fine - there just isn't a working tool to automatically convert old blogs, social messages and visitor messages.

[Gladhatter]

Originally Posted by The Geek said in part

Let me first start by apologising for my sporadic attendance here, however my rl zaps most of my free time now and I have less time to code and/or support this project. Let me then follow up by again thanking DJ for his tireless support of this mod. If it wasn't for his support, I am sure most would agree that this mod would be as dead as a doornail (whatever the hell a dead doornail is).

.

Geek, I am also wishing to thank DJ and yourself and your devotion to life as well as this program. I wish to assure you for what it is worth that your work has added flavor to my life and even affored me a pleasurable day of music and a day off of RL just yesterday. It is a huge hit on our fledgling forum and getting better. I am listing to music as I type this in fact and am ever so appreciative.

I wish to add to the "usless knowledge base" for you. A door nail is that nail that is used in the top or door of an old time wooden coffin and thus the association of death.

While probably not originating in the original bird flu pandemic during WWI it certainly gained poplar usage there when often was the case in these parts that there was not enough living in communites to bury the dead. But I digress and yet again I wish to thank you for your finest code.

Should you decide at some point to drop it, I will likely hire help if possible to continue it.