The discussion forum is your best source for getting help with TubePress. The volume of messages in there has been increasing over time, and to that end it’s become more of a challenge to make sure that everyone that has a question gets answered. I simply can’t keep up with making sure that every single user gets a response from me (your developer). So how do you increase your chances of getting attention?

1. Include a link to your gallery. This is by far the most useful piece of information you can provide. If it’s a client-side problem, we can use FireBug to diagnose. For server-side problems, we can use TubePress’s debugging mode. But without a link to your gallery we can’t do anything.
2. If your gallery is nested somewhere on your site, please don’t send a link to your home page and make us search for the gallery. Instead send a direct link to your gallery.
3. Describe the problem in as much detail as possible. Reports along the lines of “It’s not working” or “I’m getting some error message” are simply not enough to go on. Please copy/paste any error messages and include them in the post.

If you follow these guidelines, I promise I will make a best effort to help you out. Please remember that I don’t get paid to offer this kind of support – I do it because I’m dedicated to keeping TubePress as the leading video gallery integration tool.

Here are some things that I can pretty much guarantee won’t get a response…

1. Asking a question that’s been answered already in the forum. Please do your homework and search before asking!
2. Asking a question that’s answered in the documentation. See above.
3. Sending me a personal email with a question that should be asked in the forum. I can’t keep up with all my email as it is. If you have a legitimate reason to send me a private message, I’ll do my best to respond.
4. Being rude. Nuff said

Thanks, and I’ll see you in the forum.

TubePress 2.0.0 has just been released, and the headlining new feature in this version is full Vimeo support! Vimeo users now can enjoy the dozens of TubePress features that have thus far been limited to YouTube videos. Choose from 8 different Vimeo sources to populate your galleries. Check out this sample gallery…

Wall of Light - Tohyto

Title

Wall of Light - Tohyto

Runtime

3:53

Views

1,054

Title

Wall of Light - Artist Jam, Sunday 25th

Runtime

3:42

Views

374

Title

Wall of Light - iink & Maki, Session 1

Runtime

4:55

Views

6,662

Title

The Wall of Light

Runtime

4:45

Views

2,047

Title

Wall of Light - iink & Maki, Session 2

Runtime

4:04

Views

583

Title

Wall of Light - Jam Session, Saturday Oct 31st

Runtime

5:15

Views

745

Title

Wall of Light - Artist Jam Thursday Oct 29th

Runtime

4:52

Views

550

Title

Wall of Light - Die.Puntigam

Runtime

6:52

Views

444

Other new features in this release include

• Brought back ability to play each video from a gallery in a new window by itself (closes  issue 94)
• Now detects and parses HTML links found in video descriptions
• Updated Italian translation thanks to Gianni Diurno
• Added Spanish translation thanks to Luis Fok
• Added Hebrew translation thanks to Yaron Ofer
• Ability to blacklist individual videos (closes  issue 162)
• Option to use high-quality thumbnails (closes  issue 96) (TubePress Pro only)
• HTML popups are now centered on screen (closes  issue 160)

Full release notes can be found here. Thank you to everyone who has submitted bug report and ideas; your feedback continues to make TubePress a better product. Please get your copy of TubePress 2.0.0 from the downloads page. Enjoy!

I’m happy to report that TubePress 1.8.9 has just been released. This version comes chock full of bug fixes and upgrades, along with one powerful new feature: the ability to embed individual videos along with all of their meta info (description, author, keywords, etc). To use it, you can simply use the video shortcode attribute to identify the video. e.g. [tubepress video="J51kfduN5aA"] will produce…

You can even customize the HTML structure for the embedded videos using the existing template shortcode attribute. Here are the full docs on how to use this new feature.

As usual, you can grab the latest version of TubePress from the downloads page. Please feel free to report any issues or feature requests, and remember that feedback of all kinds is always welcome. Enjoy!

TubePress 1.8.7 will include a major overhaul of the templating system that could affect current users of TubePress, especially those with existing template modifications. Because of the disruption, I feel it’s important to post an entry here outlining the upcoming changes and why they were made.

Prior to now, TubePress has used HTML_Template_IT from the PEAR project for its templates. While this has been an adequate way to separate business logic from presentation, it has suffered from the following weaknesses:

• Requires TubePress users to learn yet-another template syntax just to modify the look of their galleries
• Clunky “parse” concept to handle looping over collections of elements
• No strong tie between variable names in the templates to variable names in the underlying code
• Overhead that’s inherent in any PEAR library (error handling, etc)
• Too many template files to modify (not really the libraries fault)
• Package is no longer maintained

In TubePress 1.8.7, I have completely ditched HTML_Template_IT and instead chosen to use an extremely lightweight template system that uses plain PHP/HTML. This new system overcomes all of the weaknesses listed above, and I think you’ll find it quite easy to use and blazingly fast.

One other change to note is the semantic structure of the HTML that TubePress produces for its galleries. TubePress will now produce clean, semantically correct HTML to describe the structure of the gallery. Specifically, galleries will now take advantage of the HTML dl/dt/dd elements. All styling of this gallery is done via ui/gallery/css/tubepress.css, and a few extra classes have been added to each gallery element to allow for easy customization.

If you haven’t really modified TubePress’s templates or CSS in the past, you won’t even notice a change in this release. But for those of you who have modified your installation, you’ll need to make a one-time effort to get your styling to work with this new system.

I’m not a fan of making such disruptive changes, but the time to pay down some technical debt is here. And for the long-term health of TubePress’s code base, this is absolutely necessary. I hope you’ll agree that these template changes will provide you with greater freedom and ease in modifying TubePress to suit your site.

TubePress 1.8.7 should be out in the next few days, after I get a chance to complete testing and update the documentation. Please provide any feedback in the forum, and thanks for using TubePress.

I’m happy to announce that TubePress 1.8.6 is now available for download. This release is chock full of bug fixes, and includes a very slick new Ajax-enabled pagination feature for TubePress Pro users. Here is the full list of what’s changed:

• WordPress options page now uses jQuery tabs
• Fixed bug that could prevent request cache from working in some PHP installations
• (TubePress Pro only) Ajax pagination (closes Ticket #45 and Ticket #111)
• (TubePress Pro only) Version bump for jQuery (1.2.6 -> 1.3.2)
• (TubePress Pro only) Removed potential “Invalid locale category name” warning that shows up on some PHP installations
• Version bump for JW FLV Media Player (to 4.6)
• Fixed bug that prevented display of videos with “limited syndication” restriction
• Shortcode and input validation is much more comprehensive (closes Ticket #129)
• Fixed bug that prevented videos from playing in high definition upon request (closes Ticket #137)
• Added rel=”nofollow” to pagination links (closes Ticket #133)
• Minor refactoring of tubepress.js functions
• Updated WordPress plugins page blurb
• Updated Italian translation thanks to Gianni Diurno
• Various trivial improvements to HTML templates

All users are encouraged to upgrade to this release. Many thanks to all the feedback via the discussion forum and filing issues. As always you can grab your copy of TubePress from the downloads page. Enjoy!

Just released version 1.8.5 of TubePress and TubePress Pro! This version comes with some cool new features and a few very important bug fixes:

• Videos now play correctly on iPhone and iPod Touch (closes Ticket #101)
• Flexible shortcodes! No need to include commas between attribute/value pairs. Can use single, double, or no quotes around attribute values. e.g. [tubepress mode="featured" author="false"] will work as well as the old way of [tubepress mode='featured', author='false']
• Greatly improved debugging mode
• Fixed bug that prevents all videos in gallery from playing if first video in gallery is unavailable (closes Ticket #115)
• Fixed bug that could prevent video playback, and JavaScript error, on Firefox with AdBlock Plus enabled (closes Ticket #124)
• Added ability to cap the total number of videos in a gallery (closes Ticket #65)
• Updated Italian translation thanks to Gianni Diurno
• Shadowbox CSS no longer tries to load non-existent images. (closes Ticket #112)
• WordPress galleries are no longer wrapped with HTML <p> tags (closes Ticket #79)
• WordPress.org compliant readme.txt changelog (closes Ticket #123)

As usual, you can grab this release from the downloads page. If you need help with anything, check out the documentation or head over to the discussion forum. Have fun!

On the heels of 1.8.0.RC1, I’m happy to announce that 1.8.0 final is now available for download. I was pleasantly surprised with the small number of bugs found in RC1. There was a typo on the options page, and I adjusted how TubePress handles private videos based on some great user feedback.

This release also includes drastically overhauled documentation. I’m now using DocBook for all the documentation. I’ve always been impressed with the Spring Framework docs, so I pretty much mimicked how they build it. I think you’ll find it’s much more detailed than before and easier to navigate.

Grab your copy now, and report any feedback in the forum. Enjoy!

Maybe you noticed this site’s new theme. I had been using blog.txt from the folks over at plaintxt.org with some success for well over a year, but I kept feeling that the project was outgrowing its own site. The right sidebar felt clumsy, the footer was embarrassingly empty, and there was no easy way to scale the navigation.

After casual theme shopping for a few weeks, I stumbled upon Modslider from Graph Paper Press. Many things I like about this theme (and these designers):

• Elegant, muted style
• Very slick drop-down navigation menu that can easily support a handful of pages
• Tons of space for widgets (which I use fairly heavily)
• Clean code – concise HTML and no shameless self-ads
• A bold “introduction” bubble at the top of the home page
• The price. I had no idea how expense WordPress themes are getting these days! With Graph Paper Press, you can pay a reasonable fee for access to all their themes.

I’d also like to note that I started using the WP Table Reloaded plugin. You can see it in action on the downloads page as well as the features comparison page. Here’s why this plugin is great:

• Import/export your tables to/from CSV, XML, or HTML. I can now use version control for my tables, as they’re just XML files. Sweet!
• Total control of the CSS. I actually stole some of my table styles from the Trac project
• Shortcodes. I love shortcodes.

Hope you like the new site as much as I do.

It’s about a month late, but I’m very excited to announce that the first release candidate of TubePress 1.8.0 has landed on the downloads page. There are a ton of changes in this version; the full list can be found here. Here are the notables:

• New embedded player option: JW Flv Media Player
• New player location: jqModal
• Refactored JavaScript functionality with jQuery
  • jQuery 1.2.6 or higher is now required (built-in for WordPress users)
  • Multiple galleries on a single page now behave correctly with “normal” player
  • Dynamically load JavaScript libraries as needed (Prototype, Shadowbox, etc) (closes Ticket #56)
  • All JavaScript is now unobtrusive
  • Can now use modal players (e.g. Shadowbox) in a TubePress shortcode
• Removed extra HTML comments and whitespace. Galleries now use about 16% less bandwidth.

Due to all the significant changes, I’d like to release this first as a release candidate for testing. Please send your feedback either to the discussion forum or submit a new issue. Thus far it’s been tested with

• Mac OS X: Firefox 3 and Safari 3
• Windows XP: Internet Explorer 7 and 8
• Linux: Firefox 3

You may notice that I’ve removed GreyBox and LightWindow as player options. I spent a long time trying to wrangle these libraries into submission, but I simply couldn’t delay a new release of TubePress any longer. It seems that the majority of TubePress users are not using these players, so hopefully it won’t cause a huge comotion.

Between this release and the release of 1.8.0 final, I’ll be working on more unit tests and documentation. TubePress Pro 1.8.0 will be available at the 1.8.0 final release as well.

Good luck testing, and enjoy this new release!

Just released version 1.7.2 of TubePress. This version includes a bunch of bug fixes and some new features including:

• Fullscreen playback now available in embedded player (closes Ticket #64)
• Created “YouTube Feed” options category. Moved some of the advanced options into this category.
• Added ability to exclude non-embeddable videos (closes Ticket #69)
• Added jscolor HTML color picker for embedded player colors
• Fixed bug where debugging mode threw a fatal error (closes Ticket #80)
• Fixed bug where random video sort order would throw a fatal error
• Added ability to toggle display of title/rating before video starts playing
• Now using version 2.0 of YouTube gdata API (closes Ticket #68)

As usual, anyone can get this version from the download page. TubePress Pro users, just use your download link sent to you after your purchase. Please report any problems via a new ticket or in the discussion forum. Hope you enjoy!