Video "posts"

[Josh]

I’m not feeling stuck on any of the other aspects of the project.

I have uncertainties to clear up about how much can be done with existing plugins & small customization (most things, it seems, but manipulating Zotero import automatically might be one special case & there will probably be more substantial ones), and I don’t know how much real diff there is in the way different custom field plugins format their info in metadata. Things I’ve read say they are all similar & differences are mostly about input & output functionality rather than truly substantive differences in data rep, but it’s hard to be sure without concrete experimentation.

Picked up one of Jesse Ventura’s books tonight…so now I can really get going in high gear 🙂

[Josh]

Updating my understanding…A <Custom Post Type> is a very reified thing in WordPress which is easy to select on through the (theoretically database and SQL-independent) WP query interface. There are lots of plugins for creating Custom Post Types and a handful that will add fields that all or some of those custom post types have, saying nothing about how those fields may or may not relate to any other post type. Advanced Custom Fields is more like a sub Select query, giving conditional logic of what fields, default values, etc. a post object has as a function of its other data, including post type. Each ACF “field group” is conceptually like a different table with its own logic of which posts can populate it with which values. ACF is good for getting a lot of control about what all can be displayed once one has a post object in mind. For whatever reason, there are not a lot of plugins around that offer coding free solutions to filtering by custom fields…possibly because the WP_query interface doesn’t build that sub-select logic into itself. The general advice seems to be to create custom post types using whatever method is convenient and then use ACF to specify the logic of which field/values are conditionally available for each basic value post type – i.e. for each post including its custom type field. Other plugins work on the human factors of entering different custom combos – that seems to be a big part of Piklist, though it does other things too.

Looking HERE, I see that my guess about sub-select for custom fields was correct, but current wp_query does support sub-select with a special syntax. Maybe that is recent or changed and that is why current plugin GUI support is weak.

[Josh]

Ok, searching in plugins for *query*, looks like now we are making progress!

The above is actually the only example I found. But I’ll check it out.

[Josh]

The lack of standardization for interoperation between different WordPress custom field schemes is disappointing. The major players there – ACF, Toolset, Metabox, Wck, and maybe some others all sell upgrade premium plugins that build on their free ones…and this likely hampers interoperability initiatives/standardization. The differences are likely mostly about naming conventions for the keys and the value and how to handle complex compositions. ACF is the brand leader, but damages the free offering with no repeaters & offers no other free functionality besides creation. Do other plugins step in on top of ACF? Suspiciously, it seems ones that did no longer operate with current versions of ACF or WordPress.

Pods is different – it implements fields for a custom post type in a way that is more reified & it refies “pod” custom post types with their own menus in the WP admin GUI. On the other hand, the current version of PODs also lacks a repeater field (promised in upcoming version) and its storage scheme is a lot less space efficient – which I guess I don’t care about much except as far as making a lot of snapshots with git.

The above set of issues is what I’ve been wrestling with this AM, trying to figure out which path is optimal for me.

[Josh]

Lost my prior note. Basically said I was going to start working on using the set of video related WP plugins I gathered to see about manually styling embedded video with thumbnails, lazy loading ,etc.

Toolset Types is working out well for expressing metadata. They have proprietary tools for creating pages, galleries, and styling custom posts, but they show how to do it with PHP as well. For my example of a parent annotated video with children that are annotations of different cue points/times within the video, I probably need to follow their example of how to grab the children info using the parent. This logic gets expressed in a PHP template file named for the relevant custom post parent type, which WordPress finds

First I need a good manual design for responsive video+text+controls containers.

[Josh]

I’m thinking of a div design for video with 3 areas. There is left col area that has top level controls – if multiple sections of a video or group of videos are annotated, then these are listed with short descriptions descending, and more description available by hovering over each choice. Click on a choice brings up video in the largest of the 3 areas, rectangle top right, and a scrollable text box with notes below the video area. Videos can be either remote hosted on a YouTube Vimeo – in which case the big rectangle is an iframe which gets fed parameters by the controls on the left, or locally hosted, in which case there is a video player. A third choice, – contractually hosted video from a 3rd party site – behaves like the locally hosted, with a player. Point is that the page designer doesn’t have to worry about where the video is hosted…it fills the same spot on the page either way & is controlled in more or less the same way. In either case, viewers should have the option of going to full/large screen with the videos. But the main goals I’m working on are a system of concepts/evidence/prose ideas, so the visual qualities of the videos are not too important, and its works out to keep them small by default…they are like big/dynamic references which add different info & perspective than printed refs.

Today was good progress in terms of gathering the tools/know how to implement something along these lines.

[Josh]

Yesterday was a kind of slow-getting-started intro to the world of online digital video curation & doing that through a WordPress website. In this post, I’ll try to summarize what I learned.

1) Recent versions of WordPress white list “only” a set of video providers that they recognize for standard treatment. This list includes YouTube & Vimeo & other similar user sites. Categories of potential interest to me that it doesn’t include are originating media outlets & sites like archive.org. The standard treatment does offer, in modern browsers, an attractive embed that can be responsively styled for size. The way it happens is through a dynamic exchange of info with the hosting site via a protocol called oembed. The video does not start playing immediately, but there is some performance implication for loading time in terms of running oembed between website & video host & then, I believe, some initial buffering of the iframe running between the client browser and the originating site.

2) Things I want to improve or do differently relative to current native WordPress defaults described in 1):

a) load my own chosen thumbnails that don’t start loading anything else until the user initiates play;

b) be able to start the video at selected timepoints with relevant info – this is well supported for YouTube video already by 3rd parties, as it was something YouTube itself supported well. It was not traditionally well supported by Vimeo, so it has to be manipulated for Vimeo via javascript control of the player within the created iframe. This is technically doable but requires working out some kinks. Hopefully, the same approach can be extended to other sites, via some customization for each one of interest.

c) Selectively use some other media sources

d) create a reliably archived backup source for each video of interest. There are a lot of possible routes to doing that & I am not sure which is best or best in which case. They include: i. downloading to my web host & storing there, which could be managed either within WordPress or outside of it; ii. trying to work through a site like archive.org or archiveteam.org – use of “like” is misleading as those are two special, non-profit cases. I believe both would intend to archive the kind of content I am interested in, however working out the details and being able to reliably access it programmatically as a backup might be tricky/time-consuming or sub-optimal in some other way; iii. using a 3rd party commercial service – like the embedding and option ii., this has the benefit of not using website bandwidth for playback, however, it either costs $$ or is sub-optimal in some other way – e.g. less capable player with watermark signs on it.

3) I didn’t complete my initial pass of available plugins to see how much of 2) they could provide, but the ones I did look at and the descriptions of the others left me dubious that they are going to be a huge help for anything other than YouTube.

4) Considerations of 2) and results of 3) motivates a desire to do some programmatic customization. Trying to do that through WordPress motivates a desire to be able to customize style/program WordPress pages directly. Because WordPress generates each page it serves programmatically rather than statically, and because the program is hooked in my different places, and because WordPress standard solutions to customization involve implementing on top of an existing theme or plugin which might not be a permanent choice…there is a motivation to use special plugins which exist for programming insertion of custom CSS/JS/PHP in posts & pages. In the case of the videos, I was already planning to do this through the custom post mechanisms with regular templates for custom posts & my own plugins for custom posts. In fact, I think that is the best long-term approach – put most of that functionality in my own software & find a way to include it in sub-themes with just a quick linking mechanism. But that is awkward for rapid development of basic capabilities. So I was motivated to look at various offerings for global customization. The one that seemed the most full featured, even in its free version, CSS-Javascript-Toolbox suffered from confusing documentation (despite putting in a good effort in that direction) and a somewhat problematic approach to hooking. The thing that’s configured out of the box places your custom hook in either the header or the footer of a page. In order to put the custom stuff in the body, one has to turn on a “Metabox” for some class of body targets – could be page or post type. I wasted a few hours getting to that simple point of understanding. Unfortunately, the implementation of the “Metabox” has a lot of download bloat in the resulting dynamically created page. This might be better for a Metabox that only relates to a custom post type. So maybe the tool is good for prototyping or some intermediate stage. But I decided to look for A different plugin tool that was more transparent in its effects. Will be testing that one out today. Looking at the author’s website, they do a lot of WordPress customization and don’t sell the tool upgrade, so I imagine it is something they find useful as experts.

[Josh]

Upon investigation, it turns out that most of this problem is common enough & difficult/hairy enough to widely support that embed.ly has based a business on the service of solving it. Fortunately, they give away their solutions for free in my plausible set of use cases…so that looks like the way to go. The have a javascript player interface for controlling their embeds that allows one to set starting offset.

I’m going to try to use that as a base and then add on the other things – thumbnails, alt source, etc.

[Josh]

Just spent a big chunk of time looking for a good starting place to continue with the project above. Eventually, I came around to the view that what I actually wanted was a real Javascript widget that I could customize, wrapped up as a WordPress plugin, so it was already handling loading and also had some kind of convenient admin interface for entering data. That proved to be the correct search strategy. I found a relevant Javascript gallery widget – https://html5box.com/html5lightbox/ – which was available wrapped in a WordPress plugin –

Home

WordPress Slider Plugin Quick Start Guide

Next step is to modify it to 1) use embed.ly blocks as targets, 2) let me customize the shapes, positions, the layout of the various parts while keeping the same basic javascript action architecture, and then 3) add control of the player to 1) so I can set the starting offsets.

[Author]

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