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!

• 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
  • # 20
  • # 25
  • # 7
• Upgrade source to GPLv3

It also works with WordPress 2.5, though the options page doesn’t look quite as nice. Enjoy!

• “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!

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

Version 1.5.1 of TubePress, available from the download link on the right, fixes the issue.

I’ve been making steady progress on the next major version of the plugin. It will include some exciting new features, so stay tuned!

If you’re updating, just overwrite the old version and visit the options page (WP Admin > Options > TubePress) at least once to initialize the new version. Enjoy!

• New features
  • “All tags” and “Any tags” modes now merged into “YouTube search” mode
  • Play videos with GreyBox (this replaces ThickBox)
  • Play videos with lightWindow
  • Pagination now uses modified Digg Style pagination
  • Max player size is now 424px x 336px (removes thin white border from player)
  • Input validation on options page
  • All error messages are extremely detailed
  • Debug mode is more comprehensive
  • Option to disable debugging mode completely

• Bug Fixes
  • Embedded video is XHTML compliant
  • “Playlist” mode pages correctly (thanks, YouTube!)
  • “Normal” mode displays title and runtime correctly after user click

• Under the Hood
  • Much better code documentation
  • Code style is PEAR compliant
  • XML parsing uses PEAR’s XML_Unserializer instead of XMLIster
  • Almost all functions moved to classes (helps namespace management)
  • WordPress-specific code is cleanly isolated
  • Improved message-resources handling
  • Revamped directory structure
  • Improved naming conventions all around
  • Quasi-private methods (PHP4 OOP isn’t too sophisticated)
  • Most HTML printing methods use sprintf (or variant) - improves readability