Calm Development

Video of the Day: Uploading and Scheduling Movies (requires flash plugin)

This animated tutorial will demonstrate how to upload and schedule movies on your website(s) using Video of the Day. In the previous tutorial I covered post installation configuration tasks such as how to configure an FTP server to establish an available connection to the content server that you'd like to upload to. You're not restricted to using any single FTP server.

For example, let's say you store one niche of content on server A and another niche of content on server B. When it comes time to upload content to server B, simply select that server from the drop list as the target upload server. Video of the Day remembers what server your content has been uploaded to and provides access to all of the remotely stored content to be used for inclusion within any domain's web page running on your server.

Note: You can add the same FTP server multiple times - however, make sure you are using a unique storage directory for each instance. For example, '/var/www/calmdev.com/html/content/cooking/' could store my cooking content and '/var/www/calmdev.com/html/content/travels/' could store my family travel content. Both would use the same FTP Login information, however each niche of content would be stored in it's own unique directory.

Before proceeding with the uploading of your movie content, you'll need to add at least one website into the system. Generally, if you're promoting any type of web affiliate program, using video promotional content, this would be the place to enter the domain and linking code associated to one of the affiliate web program's websites. So if I planned on promoting 'Website A', I'd enter the website domain 'WebsiteA.com' and my linking code which may look something like 'http://www.WebsiteA.com?ref=4m34&tour=1&exits=no'. If you aren't promoting any type of program you may enter own domain and link to the home page. The websites you submit here are used during the movie upload process to associate the uploaded files with a website. The associated domain and linking code are then made available from within your templates as two of the seven special PHP variables that are available for use. You'll learn about the seven special PHP template variables in the next tutorial.

Below is an explanation of each form field that can be found on the movies form:

Content Server: Target FTP server. The uploaded files will be transfered to the content server. Select a target server from the drop down box.
Associated Website: Website the content is associated with. Example, your website or a sponsors. Video of the Day associated each movie that is uploaded into the system with a website.
Movie Title: Provides a way for you to recognize the uploaded files within Video of the Day. It's alsol be used for the value of the alt and title attributes associated with your movie screen shot image tags.
Movie Title Suffix: Appends string to the end of file names. Some people like to add text strings to the end of file names to help users remember where they downloaded content from. Example, -MyWebsiteName could create: movie-title-MyWebsiteName.wmv
Go Live Date: Date the uploaded content should be displayed on your website. Input is month, day, year format.
ImageMagick Path: Path to ImageMagick's convert utility. If you're not sure login to `ssh` and type `whereis convert`. If ImageMagick is installed you should receive output similar to, "convert: /usr/bin/convert". Otherwise, you'll need to install ImageMagick or contact your system administrator.
Movie Clip: Motion picture file that you'd like to upload.
Screenshot 1: Still picture image file associated with movie clip.
Screenshot 2: See `Screenshot 1`.
Crop Size: Dimensions in pixels for image resizing. For example, entering 240x180 will create an image 240px wide by 180px high using imagemagick.

When editing movies, Video of the Day uses smart file management routines to allow for any desired rescheduling, renaming or re-uploading after the initial upload process. Your files are keeped well organized in separate folders named according to the scheduled go live date within content directories that you specify during each FTP server configuration.

For example, if you'd like to move content from one server to another Video of the Day will move the files from server A to the appropriate content directory on server B. If you edit a movies title - the associated file names are also updated on the remote content server, deleting movies from the system also deletes associated files from the remote server, changing the go live date moves remote content to the corresponding content folder, Re-uploading files will replace existing files with the new copy, deleting a website will delete all content assoicated with that website from each content server, etc.

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