How to fix your Vimeo gallery (and why it’s broken)
Today is my 30th birthday. On my way out to lunch, I got this note from Vimeo
Hi Eric,
Just wanted to let you know that we’ve disabled your Tubepress application on Vimeo because we discovered that you are hardcoding the API key and secret into the app.
The result? Every single TubePress Vimeo gallery in the world now shows up completely blank. Happy birthday!
Here’s the deal. Every time TubePress, or any 3rd-party app, contacts Vimeo, it needs to authenticate itself using a pre-shared secret. This is in place to prevent abuse of their API, and in principle I understand their need for a safeguard like this. But my goal has always been to make it easy for you, my customers, to get up and running with Vimeo quickly. Thus, I indeed hard-coded a Vimeo “key” into TubePress. Today this key was disabled.
It’ll take me some time to put in an elegant solution, but here’s how to get your gallery up and running right now.
- Log in to Vimeo. You’ll have to create an account if you don’t have one
- Click here to register yourself a new key. Here’s what my registration form looks like (click to enlarge)
- Make a note of your “consumer key” and your “consumer secret”. Here’s what mine looks like
- Edit tubepress/classes/org/tubepress/url/VimeoUrlBuilder.class.php. You’ll want to insert your consumer key and secret into lines 152 and 171, respectively. Just replace the keys that are there now. Here’s what the lines look like
Is this a hassle? Absolutely. Am I peeved about this? Hell yes. Is there anything else I can do? Not that I can think of. These are the rules set out by Vimeo, and unfortunately if we want to use their service we will have to comply.
Please use the support forum if you need assistance with any of this. As per usual, TubePress Pro users will get priority support. I’m sorry for the service disruption, but I hope you’ll agree that I did what I did to make it easier for you to use TubePress.
Now, I need a beer.
Read MoreGrowing Pains, Part 1: A New Discussion Forum
Recently I posted about how I was having trouble keeping up with the discussion forum. Unfortunately I was becoming more and more overwhelmed with supporting users. It was hurting development (because I never had time) and I was starting to resent TubePress for clogging my inbox.
I decided that what TubePress needed was a discussion forum with more features and more ability to be controlled. I’m not the only one that wasn’t happy with Google Groups. Their spam control is terrible, and I know that many users found actually searching the forums to be difficult.
Here’s the punchline: TubePress’s discussion forum is now located at http://tubepress.org/forum and powered by the (fully featured) phpBB software. As you can see, it’s broken into two main sections: public and TubePress Pro. Anyone can post in the public area (though some forums there require free user registration). The TubePress Pro forums will be monitored by me, your developer, and I’ll focus my support there.
If you’re already a TubePress Pro user, you can get instructions for logging in here. Please contact me if you need assistance.
Don’t forget that anyone can register on tubepress.org and gain access to the free forums! I hope you’ll find the new forum more useful than the old. Thanks for using TubePress!
Read MoreHow 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.
Read MoreHello, 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…
Other new features in this release include
- Brought back ability to play each video from a gallery in a new window by itself (closes
Read More
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!
Read MoreUpcoming, 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.
Read More1.8.6 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
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
Read More
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!
Read MoreNew 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.
Read MoreTubePress Sidebar
