How to get help in the discussion forum
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?
- 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.
- 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.
- 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…
- Asking a question that’s been answered already in the forum. Please do your homework and search before asking!
- Asking a question that’s answered in the documentation. See above.
- 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.
- Being rude. Nuff said
Thanks, and I’ll see you in the forum.
Hello, Vimeo
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…
No videos to populate this TubePress gallery.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!
TubePress 1.8.9 – Embed individual videos with meta information!
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!
Upcoming, potentially disruptive changes to TubePress’s template system
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.
1.8.6 Now Available
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!
1.8.5 Has Been Released
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!
1.8.0 Final
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!
New Look for tubepress.org
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.
TubePress 1.8.0.RC1
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!
1.7.2 Is in the Wild
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!
TubePress 1.7.0 Released
Just posted version 1.7.0 of the plugin. This version includes some significant bug fixes, a few new features, and a German translation thanks to Pascal Berger. Here are the release notes:
- Option to initialize TubePress options in WordPress (closes Ticket #52)
- Now works with PHP <= 5.1.0 again (closes Ticket #59 and Ticket #67)
- Links to popup.php are drastically shorter, which avoids a 404 on some webservers (closes Ticket #55)
- Added German translation thanks to Pascal Berger (closes Ticket #58)
- Option to play videos in HD (closes Ticket #33)
- Option to show custom video in embedded player on page load while using "normal" player (closes Ticket #26)
As usual, download the latest version from tubepress.org/download. Enjoy!
Nightly Builds
If you don’t feel like checking out from Subversion, you can now download nightly builds of TubePress at http://tubepress.org/builds/tubepress_nightly.zip
Announcing TubePress Pro
Some of you may have noticed that the language on this site has changed over the past few weeks to become slightly less WordPress-centric. If you’ve been watching the code evolve, you’ll also have noticed that the amount of code specific to the WordPress environment has been slowly shrinking. My goal with all of this has been to allow TubePress break free from the restriction of running inside WordPress. Today, with the formal introduction of TubePress Pro, that goal has been reached! With TubePress Pro, you can now get all of the benefits of the TubePress plugin in any PHP environment. Essentially, it’s standalone TubePress!
One thing to note is that I have decided to charge a reasonable fee for TubePress Pro. The donations to TubePress thus far haven’t been quite what I expected, and I hope that you’ll respect my decision to offer this paid product alongside the original. Both the WordPress plugin and TubePress Pro are both 100% GPL‘d, so you’ll always have the source code available to tweak if you like. The WordPress plugin will always been 100% free.
You might be thinking, “Great, another piece of software tacking ‘Pro’ on the end of its name.” I’ve actually put a good amount of thought into what to call this product. I think “Pro” sums up the goals best, as I plan to continue to add features to TubePress Pro that would be of interest to professional bloggers and site administrators (integrated ad support comes to mind).
TubePress Pro shares much of its code base with the original WordPress plugin, so if you’re happy with the TubePress as it is, you can count on me to continue to maintain the code and add features.
If you’d like to try TubePress Pro, head over to the downloads page and give it a try. The TubePress documentation has been updated to show you how easy it is to use.
Thanks, and enjoy!
TubePress 1.6.9 Released Today!
New features and bug fixes include:
- Default thumbmail URL now uses “default.jpg” (closes ticket #47)
- Fixed bug that resulted in inability to paginate past the first page of a multi-page gallery.
- Version bumps
- Under the hood
- Huge amounts of unit/integration tests
- Major refactoring of classes (now using dependency injection)
Download from http://tubepress.org/download and enjoy.
Stand by in the next day or two for an announcement regarding TubePress Pro, which will enable you to use TubePress anywhere that runs PHP!
TubePress 1.6.7 Released
I’m happy to announce the latest stable version of TubePress. This release includes many bug fixes, as well as the following cool new features:
- Ability to apply random sort order to your YouTube galleries
- Toggle the request cache on or off
- YouTube connection test in debugging mode
Full release notes can be found here. Grab version 1.6.7 from the downloads page. Enjoy!
TubePress 1.6.6 Released – Widgetized!
I’m happy to announce the release of version 1.6.6 of TubePress. This version includes the ability to have a gallery of videos in your WordPress sidebar as a widget – a long asked for feature! (closes Ticket #12). Here are the rest of the new features:
- Removed pass-by-reference warnings (closes Ticket #34)
- Ability to limit length of video descriptions
- Option to toggle relative dates/times for video upload timestamps
- Swedish translation. Thanks to Mikael Jorhult
- Improved error handling for PHP installations with suppressed error output
- Removed several small bugs that affected users of PHP < 5.2.1
Grab your copy now from the download page. Enjoy!
Hilarity in the Discussion Group
TubePress is released under the GNU General Public License Version 3. Let’s start with a quote from the license (which, not conicidentally, can be found in every single source file of TubePress)
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE
Doesn’t get much clearer than that. It means that the author will try his/her best to meet the needs of the user, but this contract comes with zero expectations on either the user’s or the developer’s end.
I’m passionate about open source software. At work we use dozens of programs in our production enterprise apps. Indeed, the Department of Defense has acknowledged the huge benefits of utilizing open source software throughout the military.
In addition, TubePress is one of the thousands of programs that is almost entirely developed by a single person in his/her spare time: me. Spare time is not something that I have a lot of – who does? But I devote as much as I possibly can to TubePress. Why? Because I love writing software. I love seeing people use the apps I write. It’s fun for me to help people debug their technical problems. I’m a software development from 7:30am to 5pm, then I get home and squeeze in another hour or two of development on personal projects.
With that said, let’s examine some amusing recent activity in the TubePress forums from a user with the pseodonym of “mikey1.” A guy that goes by Mikey? You know this is gonna be good.
First, our boy Mikey starts yesterday afternoon with a common bug that affects users of version 1.6.5:
Hi, I just started using Tube Press, and I really like it, I have just
one problem, my thumbnals show up, but whenever I click on one, it
always goes to the same first clip, is this a known problem. Also it
works in my 2.6 blog but not in my 2.5.1 blog, I get the following
error.
Call-time pass-by-reference has been deprecated - argument passed by
value; If you would like to pass it by reference, modify the
declaration of [runtime function name](). If you would like to enable
call-time pass-by-reference, you can set
allow_call_time_pass_reference to true in your INI file. However,
future versions may not support this any longer. in /var/www/vhosts/
greenroomuk.com/httpdocs/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/tubepress/
tubepress_main.php on line 22
Any help Appreciated. Mike.
Pretty usual post. And under other circumstances I’d have been happy to point him in the right direction. Had he spent 5 seconds searching for this error message he’d have found the solution that was posted weeks ago. We’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. The next message came a mere 10 hours later:
Its become obvious that no one answers the problems regarding tube
press on google groups, therefore, today I have deleted this plugin,
and will advise. any members on my different blogs, not to use it. The
developer seems unavailable and uninterested in the plugin, and it
doesn't work on 2.6 or 2.5.1
Ouch! I must’ve misplaced the “tube press” SLA that I signed with Mr. Mikey. Again, had he even bothered to search the 400+ messages in the discussion group, he’d have seen that I had personally and happily responded to the vast majority of them. I guess my regular commits over the past two years doesn’t meet Sgt. Mikey’s definition of “interested.”
But wait! It gets even better:
This is totally unnecessary, making people sign in to google groups
for no response, no help.
Plus the fact I'm too busy running my own sites to have my members
constantly complaining about plugins that developers obviously have no
interest in, and yes I know the standard answers, "If you don't like
it, don't use it".
It’s gonna be sad to see Capt. Mikey’s 3 users not use TubePress. But he’s obviously a very important, busy person, and who can blame him for not being able to wait a day or two for a response?
Anyone that knows me personally will agree that I’m a pacifist. Under no circumstances will I provoke a fight. But if you know me, you’ll also know that I have no tolerance for morons like Muttonhead Mikey who go through life bullying people around with criticism that is 1) completely non-constructive and 2) comes from someone who is in no position to offer criticism in the first place. Mikey reminds me of one those individuals that anyone who works in the tech industry knows; he has some vague understanding of technical concepts, probably has minimal education/training in the field, surrounds his/her self with sycophants, and finds it necessary to remind everyone of their intelligence and grandeur – hence the “too busy running my own sites” comment. Manly Mikey must be one hell of a system admin – he spent all day yesterday trying to track down a PHP problem that the most barely competent server administrator could fix in an instant. (Here’s a hint, Mikey, it’s called the “PHP error log”)
It’s important to stand up to these pompous pricks. Because if nobody ever confronts them, then they’ll go through the rest of their life acting like they’re hot shit at the expense of anyone who has to deal with them.
Good riddance, Mikey!
TubePress 1.6.5 Is Out
Grab your copy from the download page or checkout the latest source. This version has plenty of bug fixes, optimizations, a security fix, and these great new features:
- i18n capability! TubePress can now be easily translated into any language. Please see the translation docs for more info
- Upgrades from here on out will no longer reset your global TubePress settings
- Multiple galleries on a single post/page are now possible
As always, you can see the full version history here. Many thanks to all the users who helped test the changes since previous versions. Since opening up the subversion repository, development has been a whole lot smoother and (perhaps more importantly) a lot more fun.
Finally, I’m asking anyone who speaks a language other than English to please consider contributing! It would take about 10 minutes of your time, and you can feel good about contributing to a 100% open source project.
Enjoy the new version!
TubePress 1.6.0 Final
I’m happy to announce that TubePress 1.6.0 is now available for download. Thanks to all who helped test and debug 1.6.0-beta! The documentation will be updated shortly to reflect the new features.
Please keep in mind that 1.6.0 requires PHP5 or higher; it should fail gracefully under PHP4. For those who cannot upgrade to PHP5, I will provide maintenance releases for version 1.5.7, but supporting the 1.6.0 version and beyond will take priority.
Have fun blogging!
TubePress 1.6.0-beta Available!
It’s been several months, but a new release of TubePress is available for download. This version includes lots of new features and a significant overhaul of the code base, so it will be released as beta until we can confirm that it’s relatively bug-free. Please give it a test and report any problems over at the issues page or on the discussion forum. Here are the new features…
- PHP5 only. This includes an overall rewrite of the code base to take advantage of PHP5-only stuff
- Responses from YouTube are now cached
- New galleries
- Top favorites
- Most recently added
- Most discussed
- Most linked
- Most responded
- New way to watch: Shadowbox.js
- Removed “New Window” player
- Much more control over embedded player
- Toggle “related videos” feature after a video finishes
- Choose from several colors
- Toggle auto-play
- Toggle “enhanced genie menu” when mouse enters video area (instead of user clicking the “menu” button)
- Toggle video loop
- Interface improvements
- Removed border and scroll bars from gallery
- Removed time of day from date uploaded
- Changed upload label from “Uploaded date” to “Uploaded”
- Pagination now supports HTTP/HTTPS and non-standard ports
- Simplified templating (easier to customize the look of your galleries)
- Issues/enhancements closed
- Upgrade source to GPLv3
It also works with WordPress 2.5, though the options page doesn’t look quite as nice. Enjoy!
TubePress 1.5.6 Is Out
This version includes fixes for all the bugs filed with version 1.5.5, but perhaps more importantly, fixes a major bug with displaying video titles. If you notice that only the first letter of each title is being displayed, you should upgrade! It appears to be the result of a change in the video feed from YouTube. Download the update using the link on the right!
TubePress 1.5.5 (RC1), Site Changes
This is the first version of TubePress that is backed by the GData API. What does that mean for you?
- “Favorites” mode now displays up to 500 videos
- “Search” mode now can return up to 1,000 videos
- New mode: videos for mobile phones
- New mode: most-viewed videos from today, this week, this month, or all time
- Customize the order of galleries by view-count, rating, relevance, or date-updated
- Randomize thumbnails (most videos come with 4 thumbnails, this option will mix it up for each pageload)
- Filter “racy” videos from galleries
- Option to show a video’s category in its metadata
There’s also tons of enhancements and a few bug fixes reported from previous versions.
I’ve also decided to change the organization of the site. Tubepress.org will remain the plugin’s main home, but the documentation, discussion forums, and development area (downloads and tickets) will move to groups.google.com and tubepress.googlecode.com. The existing forums will stay up as read-only and are available here.
Lastly, and this is important, this will be the last version of TubePress that supports PHP4. The plugin is getting quite complex and PHP4′s OOP model isn’t nearly strong enough to keep it manageable and robust.
Give 1.5.5 a try and please report any bugs that you find!
GData for YouTube
After 3 months of anticipation, YouTube has released an updated (and hopefully much less buggy) version of their API. It’s based on GData, which is Google’s standard for content publishing.
It kept all the features from the old API, and added the following neat features:
- Sort videos by data uploaded, views, rating, or relevance!
- Only retrieve videos of a particular format (the plain YouTube flash, RTSP streaming URL for mobile video playback, or the URL to the SWF player for non-embeddable videos). Apparently the majority of videos are available in the first and last of those formats.
- Filter out “racy” content
- Added time parameters (today, this week, or this month) to “Top Rated.” Previously this was just available with “Most Viewed”
Not bad, but everyone has been screaming for an upload API, which YouTube has acknowledged is still missing. I guess they’re busy like the rest of us…
What does that mean for TubePress? Well, because it’s the way YouTube is headed, and because it has all the cool new features, TubePress is going to use the new API from now on. I’ll release it with Version 1.5.5 of the plugin, which is already well underway. This release will probably come in the next few weeks. I’d work on it this weekend, but instead am headed up to Glacier National Park armed with bear mace (I’d probably use mine on a bear instead).
- The API’s new home at Google
- The gritty details of the new API
TubePress 1.5.2 Released
This version fixes a fatal error when the plugin was activated under some PHP installations. The error was related to a bug in each of the classes in /common/class/options regarding the way PEAR.php was included. As always, you can see the plugin’s full version history here. Enjoy!
