Embed support for phpBB!!!

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ianwhooper
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Embed support for phpBB!!!

Post by ianwhooper »

I think that phpBB should integrate with the Embed.ly service to enable embedding rich content (audio, video, photos, etc) in forums generated by phpBB. Embed.ly offers over 100 embed opportunities and, my favorite, the ability to embed SoundCloud player widgets! So simple too. I have already talked to phpBB developers, now we just need to show them that we want it!!!

Thoughts?

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A_Jelly_Doughnut
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Re: Embed support for phpBB!!!

Post by A_Jelly_Doughnut »

Well, for my part, I've never heard of embed.ly until I opened this topic about five minutes ago.

So I went to their website and read their docs and I don't get it. What problem does embed.ly solve?
A_Jelly_Doughnut

Nelsaidi
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Re: Embed support for phpBB!!!

Post by Nelsaidi »

From my investigation it is an interesting service for some boards, but tbh the api-ness of this adds i dont like.

For example if you add [flash]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJCfUm21BsI&fmt=18[/flash] it will return the html for a youtube embed, so more of a universel embed. Something similar exists in vBulletin and I like it there, and if can be done locally would be a nice thing to have.

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EXreaction
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Re: Embed support for phpBB!!!

Post by EXreaction »

If all it returns is HTML is is useless as phpBB will not allow posting any raw HTML.

ianwhooper
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Re: Embed support for phpBB!!!

Post by ianwhooper »

oEmbed is basically the standard for content embedding and it's a great way to enrich forums and other sites with media instead of just links (think various content types in your Facebook feed). The problem though, is that each site has to implement the oEmbed API for each service they want to support. Embed.ly simplifies this process by offering a single endpoint for all the services. This means the site can forward any of the supported URLs and get a nice embed:able return.

So if the forum engine supports Embed.ly, it will be a lot easier to add embed support for new services, and as a bonus, each site owner gets stats on the embeds on their site. Makes sense?

Nelsaidi
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Re: Embed support for phpBB!!!

Post by Nelsaidi »

EXreaction wrote:If all it returns is HTML is is useless as phpBB will not allow posting any raw HTML.
The return of such a service name (ie YouTube) can be used to determine the BBCode, to parse under as opposed to using HTML which obviously would never happen for millions of good reasons.

Using an API for this is a bad idea, adding a dependancy for vanilla phpBB is an even worse idea (if the site goes down or closes, this feature wont work, forum admins get angry, etc etc) , but a similar concept to that service performed locally as said would be cool, so rather than sending out a request to the webservice to find out which BBCode to use for a given embed link it passes it through a function which determines all of this locally. Aka hard build this concept into it.

In summary, this API is bad, but the concept is good. (my opinion)

I believe vBulletin has this locally too, not sure about the other forum software

EDIT

Pros:
- Doesnt need lots of BBCodes for multiple embed sites
- Has the possibility of supporting alot of things (admin submitted regex?)
- Easier to use (user end)

Cons:
- Only +0.1 (3.0 > 3.1) - Most of the boards already have existing [youtube].[youtubehd],[dailymotion],[etc etc] tags,
- No functional gain (all this can be done without it)
- May cause slowness (such features many board admins get carried away by bloating them)
Last edited by Nelsaidi on Tue Jun 15, 2010 2:06 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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naderman
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Re: Embed support for phpBB!!!

Post by naderman »

So basically a generic [embed] BBCode which can handle all sorts of contents, then?

Nelsaidi
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Re: Embed support for phpBB!!!

Post by Nelsaidi »

Thats more or less what is achieved by using the above Api.

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naderman
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Re: Embed support for phpBB!!!

Post by naderman »

Ok so I guess we should really just implement oEmbed support in phpBB. If anyone wants to use embed.ly with it, they could as I understand it.

oEmbed on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OEmbed
oEmbed website with documentation: http://www.oembed.com/

The options would either be to pass all URLs through to them or to add an embed bbcode and only pass the contents of the embed bbcode. As users are more used to this automatically happening, I would say embedding should happen automatically like current auto urls, but be disableable. The embed bbcode should be added as well, just like we have a [url] bbcode, in case you want to control more precisely what gets embedded.

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naderman
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Re: Embed support for phpBB!!!

Post by naderman »

This looks interesting as well: https://code.google.com/p/jquery-oembed/ With that jquery plugin it's probably already trivial to add this to phpBB.

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