channels

There were lots of support emails today around archive.org outages, I had to push through a number of uploads as an archive admin but they all seem to have finished now.

I also put in major updates for single signon. There's still lots of testing needed, but the main components are up and running on the production systems. The end result is that people should be able to cleanly login or out once to access all of our systems. Soon we hope to extend this to include SpinXpress.com in a way similar to how we handle archive.org accounts (we actually, like to do better than that, but that will take some time until we have implemented OpenID - coming in Drupal 6!).

We have a general goal of making channelitem entry smarter and easier. To that end, we allow various url formats from hosting services such as youtube.com and blip.tv. A new feature is that you can now paste a url into the "Body" field instead of the more hidden "Media URL" field. If the system spots a lonely url in the body and none in the Media URL field, it will use the one in the body. Should make life easier, especially if people don't know where to put links to videos.

I've made a lot of head way on the new channel templates. They are still on staging and need a bit more work, but all the basics are there. I've added a special block for the channel logo, but I'd like to figure out how to theme the existing og blocks since they persist well and already have links to a number of useful operations.

1. I have added the ability to paste embed's and object's directly into the ChannelItem body. With the exception of a title, all other information is optional.

2. I have modified the Ourmedia homepage player to handle this new kind of content in the feeds. so far it works with a blip.tv paste, this and the condelicious post you asked about the other day.

I am just now finishing up on the sizing issues (we can handle anything up to width of content column (about 600 currently). well let you know when it is ready.

You can see an example of this at http://staging.ourmedia.org - it is currently pulling the feed from the "sites we like" channel which i am using at the moment for testing this. you can see the channel entry here at http://channels.ourmedia.org/node/117

See also Channels and partners

Working on channels related tasks, including:

• As with the old system, this will be a collaborative blog.
• It will come from a particular group channel feed