Major Additions - 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.

Thanks everyone for making AME 2.5 Mod of the Month

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

[nektar]

Hi everyone.

I'm having a javascript error in internet explorer 8 at this line.

PHP Code:

<!-- / icons and login code -->

<script type="text/javascript">ame_toggle_view({,other : 'true',post : 'true',blog : 'true',group : 'true',vm : 'true',sig : 'true'});</script> 


The product works fine but I hate to see javascript errors in explorer status bar.

Are you guys having the same problem? I'm running 3.8.5 and the latest ame 2.5.6

Edit:

If I disable this plugin the error goes away.

PHP Code:

AME : Permission  Hide 


Does anyone know what this plugin does?

[BirdOPrey5]

I'm pretty sure that plugin "Hides" (or disables) AME for usergroups who aren't allowed to use it- if for some reason you disabled it for some users. I know one site for example where they disable it for guests.

[BirdOPrey5]

I wonder if it would be possible to make a definition that would work for any web site and pull the "title" of the site and put it as the link, so instead of:
https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/index.php
you'd get
vBulletin.org Forum

Otherwise is there some way to make this work nicely with this existing mod?
https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=189658

It works but the titles on youtube videos become full URL's instead of titles with both mods enabled.

[carsafety]

Originally Posted by BirdOPrey5

I'm using this but it's pretty standard I think.

Regular Expression:

http://www\.amazon\.[a-z\.]*/[\w%-]*/[\w]+/([\w]+).*

Replacement:

<a href="$ameinfo[url]?tag=joesultofftop-20" target="_blank" title="$ameinfo[url]"><img src="images/misc/amazon_icon.gif" border="0" alt="$ameinfo[title]" />$ameinfo[title]</a>

Replace my affiliate code (in red) with your own.

Okay I think I have found the problem. If you take a shortened Amazon link, like those you get from a Google search, it works just fine. The syntax is usually http://www.amazon.com/product-name-here/dp/JDISHIOEHO and AME turns it into http://www.amazon.com/product-name-h...filiatecode-20 . This validates using Amazon link checker just fine.

The problem arises if you use a longer Amazon link, like the ones you get when you search for an item at Amazon.com. These URLs already have a question mark in them, like ?ie=UTF8&blahblah . If you copy that, the AME appends ?tag=youraffilaitecode-20 to the end of the URL. This will not validate using the Amazon link checker, presumably because two question marks appear in the URL.

You can make it validate by appending &tag=youraffiliatecode-20 to the end of the URL instead. The problem is this syntax will not validate with the shorter URL format you might copy off Google.

All is fine if you are the only one putting Amazon links on your forum, but of course you want it to automatically append the right tag for whatever type of Amazon link a user might post.

Anyone handy with definitions have an idea on how to use ?tag= for shorter Amazon links and &tag= for the longer types that have a ? in the URL already? Maybe two separate ones?

One possible idea is that you append this to the end of any url ?tag=youraffiliatecode-20&tag=youraffiliatecode-20 . This seems like it works in limited testing, but I'm not all that familiar with AME definitions and Amazon URL formats to say for sure. Sometimes redundancy is good, sometimes it is not...

[BirdOPrey5]

If what you say is true I would make the replacement link always have an ?= even if it's a dummy value it should just be ignored, ?dummy=5... then the &tag=affiliatecode should always work. I don't know if this would pass the amazon link checker but it should work in practice.

[Digital Jedi]

A number of these previous questions, which I would specify if I had a little more time today, are somewhat rectified if you use the up-to-date definitions in the add-on thread. The default definitions for AME have not been valid or updated in quite some time. I try my best to keep mine up to date, even though that tough in all cases.

[Digital Jedi]

Originally Posted by legatw

on forum add a lot of youtube videos is to use this mod, or make better use of bbсode?

Originally Posted by BirdOPrey5

I couldn't imagine there would be much of a difference between this mod and a bb code- both are using search and replace algorithms.

I wanted to comment on this one real quick. Actually, yes, there's a big difference. BBCode uses more resources when a page is generated than AME does. This is explained somewhat in the description, but simplistically, this is less server intensive.

[carsafety]

Originally Posted by BirdOPrey5

If what you say is true I would make the replacement link always have an ?= even if it's a dummy value it should just be ignored, ?dummy=5... then the &tag=affiliatecode should always work. I don't know if this would pass the amazon link checker but it should work in practice.

From my testing today, the combined tag I posted works best. It validated in every case that I tried, including some links that get passed to the redirected mobile Amazon site on phones. That's not conclusive, but so far, so good.

Originally Posted by Digital Jedi

A number of these previous questions, which I would specify if I had a little more time today, are somewhat rectified if you use the up-to-date definitions in the add-on thread. The default definitions for AME have not been valid or updated in quite some time. I try my best to keep mine up to date, even though that tough in all cases.

I think the definition BirdOfPrey posted back a page or two was the one from your definitions and it was far superior to the default one if I recall correctly (thanks!). Of course, if you updated it recently, perhaps your most current one solves the issue another way?

[lafsunlmtd]

This worked for me for a while and now has stopped working? I'm using 2.5.6

Edit: I cleared cache and now it works

[Digital Jedi]

Originally Posted by carsafety

From my testing today, the combined tag I posted works best. It validated in every case that I tried, including some links that get passed to the redirected mobile Amazon site on phones. That's not conclusive, but so far, so good.



I think the definition BirdOfPrey posted back a page or two was the one from your definitions and it was far superior to the default one if I recall correctly (thanks!). Of course, if you updated it recently, perhaps your most current one solves the issue another way?

Any issues with that, please direct towards my thread and I'll try to address them.