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    • 6531
    • 154 Posts
    I need to build a new site for a video production company where most of the content will be videos.
    I want to host the videos on vimeo.
    I’ve built modx sites before, so I’d rather go with something I am familiar with, but there seems to be little in the way of pre-fab vimeo addons for modx, which might mean I need to do a lot more coding.
    Drupal, which I’ve never used, has several ready-to-go vimeo modules.

    So can anyone offer any advice before I take the plunge? Should I learn Drupal? Or will that take more time than getting vimeo integrated into modx?
    I need to allow my users to upload videos to vimeo ’albums’, and then have those appear as thumbnails / embedded players on various pages of the site.
    I’d like to avoid having to make the users manually update the pages as new videos are added, but it’s not a deal-breaker...

    Thanks!
      • 23299
      • 1,161 Posts
      I have not done the web user adding the videos part of this...

      I have one site where I have sort of built a container page using Ditto and TVs to aggregate Vimeo videos. Here is the kicker: a Vimeo pro account gives you more options for customizing the imbed process. You can even hide the videos from the general Vimeo pages.

      This works for me. I like Vimeo as it handles several things at once. You will not find much chatter about Vimeo or imbedding videos on this MODx forum. I am eagerly awaiting the day when we can use the HTML 5 video tag for all this stuff...
        • 4080
        • 139 Posts
        I’m very biased as strictly a MODx user/fanatic but I truly believe you’re going to have an easier time doing this with template variables in MODx. The learning curve on integration with MODx is way easier than Drupal from everything I’ve read. In MODx you can simply have a chunk with your Vimeo embed code and then a template variable that contains the video’s ID (or whatever info you need for vimeo embeds—not sure what the code looks like exactly). What’s great about MODx here (I’m sort of shooting from the hip since I’ve never used Drupal) but is the fact that you can integrate as much or as little as you want. Can’t figure out Wayfinder quite yet? Well, just hard code it in the templates and/or chunks. That’s my 22 cents. Hope it helps!

        P.S. The MODx community is super friendly and helpful. I’ve heard the opposite about Drupal but I can’t say for sure. I’m sure there’s plenty of cool Drupal peeps out there too.

        :)
          • 6531
          • 154 Posts
          Thanks for the input. I think I’ll try it in modx -- and turn to the awesome community for help.
            • 4971
            • 964 Posts
            I have integrated Vimeo with MODx sites before.

            Just create a TV for the video ID,
            a chunk for the embed code and that is it...
            you put it wherever you need it.

            The client controls all the vimeo uploading, privacy, etc.
            Then just copies the ID and enters it in the document that
            he/she wants... and voila...

            Doing thumbnails out of the videos will be interesting, I
            have not done that....

            EDIT: commented without reading brianlarsons response first...
            seems we do it the same way...
              Website: www.mercologia.com
              MODX Revo Tutorials:  www.modxperience.com

              MODX Professional Partner
              • 26016
              • 561 Posts
              Yeah, certainly doing that with embed code with a TV would be great and easy. I wish I could talk clients into hosting their vids elsewhere. smiley

              To go slightly off-topic for a sec, I have done various video players and upload scenarios in Evo (not just embed code use), and I can fiddle with them until they work, but they’re always somewhat funky and weird to set up. Have any of you had experiences, good or bad, with handling video players and video files right on your sites in Revo? Is it easier or better?

              Editorial comment: I’ve tried Drupal several times, and almost sealed the deal last time. I actually had very good experiences with their community, btw, and I consider it a phenomenal system. But I’m still here, mainly due to ease of use. smiley

              Cheers, Dave
                MODx and Wordpress development
                Linux, PHP 5.2, MySQL 5.0, Evo 1.05, Revo 2.08-pl, Firefox 4
                • 23299
                • 1,161 Posts
                I am glad this topic has come up.

                I have messed around with Vimeo, self hosted QT movie files, and other players. We are sort of in the middle of "waiting until the smoke clears" on this issue. If I host a QT file I always get feedback from someone who has an older Windows box who can’t play the movie. Using a Flash conversion will also cause issues with users who have slow graphic cards etc. Not to mention the whole bandwidth issue. And then there are all the hand held devices vs. the Adobe Flash issue.

                The other side of the coin is the whole issue of all the decisions that have to be made by the person who is editing and presenting the movie for web distribution. There are a lot of options here. Vimeo does a nice job overall. You get a pretty effective wide net with Vimeo. I prefer Vimeo to Youtube. Youtube has a wider reach but it seems like just about every video on Youtube attracts all kinds of childish or offensive comments.

                The OP has a wider issue: trying to cater to a group of web users who will be adding videos. The pro/plus account at Vimeo gives you more options. In some cases all you need is the video id number for posting the video on forums. For self contained sites you will probably need the full imbed code.

                But I found that MODx, good CSS, Ditto and TV’s made a pretty good solution...
                  • 4971
                  • 964 Posts
                  And we have not mentioned HTML5 Video support right in the browser,
                  without the need for anything else, of course there has to be
                  a Flash fallback for all the people using old browsers....

                  here there is also the issues of the cost of bandwidth and storage.
                    Website: www.mercologia.com
                    MODX Revo Tutorials:  www.modxperience.com

                    MODX Professional Partner
                    • 6531
                    • 154 Posts
                    For anyone else who might need vimeo integration, here are some snippets I’ve thrown together.
                    (You can see them in action at http://new.wheelhousenyc.com)


                    VimeoAlbum will pull in an album from Vimeo, complete with links, thumbnails, descriptions, etc.
                    Call it with
                    [tt][[VimeoAlbum?albumID=`VimeoAlbumID`]][/tt] -- get your album id from the URL for an album on vimeo.com

                    Snippet code: (I’m using zoombox -- it works great to create a popup player)
                    <?php
                    $output = '';
                    $albumData = unserialize(file_get_contents("http://vimeo.com/api/v2/album/$albumID/videos.php"));
                    
                    $output .= '<div class="VimeoAlbum">
                    ';
                    foreach ($albumData as $vid) {
                       $output .= '   <div class="VimeoAlbumItem">';
                       $output .= '      <a href="'.$vid['url'].'" title="'.$vid['title'].'" rel="zoombox[group]">';
                       $output .= '         <img src="'.$vid['thumbnail_medium'].'">';
                       $output .= '         <div class="VimeoAlbumItemCaption">'.$vid['title'].'</div>';
                       $output .= '         <div class="VimeoAlbumItemDescription">'.$vid['description'].'</div>';
                       $output .= '      </a>';
                       $output .= '   </div>
                    ';
                    }
                    $output .= '</div>';
                    
                    return $output;



                    VimeoMostRecent will return the id for the most recent video from a given album.
                    (You can change ’id’ to ’url’ if you want to retrieve the link to the video)

                    Call it with
                    [tt][[VimeoMostRecent?albumID=`VimeoAlbumID`]][/tt]

                    <?php
                    $albumData = unserialize(file_get_contents("http://vimeo.com/api/v2/album/$albumID/videos.php"));
                       return $albumData[0]['id'];



                    VimeoThumbURL will return the thumbnail for a given Vimeo Video ID:

                    <?php
                    $vdata = unserialize(file_get_contents("http://vimeo.com/api/v2/video/$VimeoVideoID.php"));
                       return $vdata[0]['thumbnail_medium'];



                    You can learn more about the kind of data you can pull here: http://vimeo.com/api/docs/simple-api

                    CAVEAT: This will only return the first 20 videos in a given album, and will not return any videos whose privacy is hidden!
                      • 20413
                      • 2,877 Posts
                      Sweet! smiley
                        @hawproductions | http://mrhaw.com/

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