collective.flowplayer 1.0b4

A simple package using Flowplayer for video content

Introduction

collective.flowplayer integrates the GPL version of Flowplayer (http://www.flowplayer.org) with Plone 3.x. It can play .flv Flash Video files or links as well as .mp3 files or links.

Installation

Add collective.flowplayer to your buildout as normal. See http://plone.org/documentation/tutorial/buildout. Don’t forget to load the configure.zcml file!

Then install the product via Plone’s Add-on products control panel.

Usage

collective.flowplayer offers several different usage modes:

Standalone player

To get a standalone video or audio player, simply add a standard Plone File anywhere in your site and upload a .flv or .mp3 file. You can also add a Plone Link whose URL points to an .flv or .mp3 URL. The ‘flowplayer’ view will automatically be selected in the ‘display’ menu, which will show a video/audio player.

You can also do this manually, of course.

Playlist

Create a Folder with several .mp3 or .flv files or links, or create a Collection that lists such files or links. Then ‘flowplayer’ from the ‘display’ drop-down at the Folder/Collection level.

This will show a video/audio player that will loop through the media in the Folder/Collection (unknown file formats will be ignored) in order. The video player will be sized to fit the largest video in the playlist.

Portlet

To place a video or audio player in a portlet, use the Video Player portlet that is installed with this product. You can choose a Folder, Collection or File to display. When displaying a Folder or Collection, you will get a playlist much like the one described above.

Note that the player in the portlet has got a fixed size, set with CSS.

Inline

In each of the cases above, the video player is actually created with JavaScript as the page is loaded. This allows some degree of graceful degradation for browsers without Flash or JavaScript, but, more importantly, makes it easy to insert a video player anywhere, including in your content pages.

To create a standalone player, you would use markup like this:

<a class="autoFlowPlayer" href="path/to/video-file.flv">
    <img src="path/to/splashscreen.jpg" />
</a>

You can also use a <div class=”autoFlowPlayer” /> around the <a /> tag if you prefer.

This would be replaced by a video player showing the video in video-file.flv, starting with a splash screen image from splashscreen.jpg. The image is optional, but if it is specified, the player will be sized to be identical to the image.

You can also get a more stripped-down player by using:

<a class="autoFlowPlayer minimal" href="path/to/video-file.flv">
    <img src="path/to/splashscreen.jpg" />
</a>

For an audio player, you can use:

<a class="autoFlowPlayer audio" href="path/to/audio-file.mp3">
    This text is replaced.
</a>

You can also use class=”autoFlowPlayer minimal audio” to get a very small audio player (essentially just a play button).

To get a playlist, you can use markup like this:

<div class="playListFlowPlayer">
    <a class="playListItem" href="path/to/video.flv">Video one</a>
    <a class="playListItem" href="path/to/video.flv">Video two</a>
    <img src="splash.jpg" />
</div>

You can also add ‘minimal’ and/or ‘audio’ to the list of classes for the outer <div /> to change the appearance of the player, or add ‘random’ to get a randomised playlist. The splash image is optional.

Kupu integration

To make it easier to use the type of markup outlined above to insert a video or audio player into a Plone content item, this product installs a few Kupu paragraph styles. You can use them like this:

Video

1. Insert the image you want to use as a splash image. You should insert this “inline” (rather than left/right floating), preferably in its own paragraph.

2. Select on the image, and make it link to the .flv or .mp3 file you want to play.

3. Select one of the Video or Audio styles from the styles drop-down.

Audio

1. Create a link to an mp3 file, e.g. out of some text. Again, place it in its own paragraph.

2. Select one of the “Audio” styles from the styles drop-down. The “left” and “right” styles will produce a small player floating to the left or right. The “Audio” style will produce a larger player on its own line.

Configuration

Flowplayer supports a large number of configuration options. A few of these will be set based on the markup used to render the player (e.g. the playlist buttons will only be rendered if there is a playlist, and most controls will be hidden in ‘minimal’ mode). Most other options can be set in the ZMI.

In portal_properties, there should be a new stylesheet called flowplayer_properties. Options set here are passed through to the player’s JavaScript configuration (make sure you use the right property type). For string properties, you can use the placeholder ${portal_path} to refer to the path to the portal root. This is useful for things like watermark images.

You can also use the ‘player’ property to change the player SWF file that’s used, e.g. to switch to FlowPlayerLight.swf, or use the commercial version if you have this installed.

Changelog

1.0b4 - 2009-03-06

• Move the Plone dependency into the buildout to avoid the problem reported in http://david.wglick.org/2009/heads-up-watch-out-for-dependencies-on-plone/

1.0b3 - 2009-02-23

• Added support for links

• Added test coverage

1.0b2 - Released September 9th, 2008

• Fixed portal_javascripts rendering traceback [optilude]

• Fixed image player view bug [optilude]

1.0b1 - Released September 6th, 2008

• Initial release