Applications / Revver Video Wordpress Plugin

Technical Reference

Introduction

The Revver Video Wordpress Plugin allows existing and new users of the popular blogging software, Wordpress to post, view, and get statistics on videos without ever leaving their own site.

Additionally, users posting video comments to a blog are automatically registered as "child users" of the primary owner of the blog. These child users are able to post, view and get statistics as well, all through the existing admin interface in Wordpress. The Revver Plugin is an ideal solution for videobloggers that are seeking a simple pre-built solution for publishing their content with Revver, and sharing in the advertising revenue accordingly.

Requirements

WP version 2.1.3 or greater

PHP 4.0.2 or greater

curl enabled for php (with outbound access)

mail tag enabled for php

All other required files and libraries are included with the download of the plugin.

Wordpress Installation

If you have not already installed Wordpress, you can do so here: http://www.wordpress.org. If you've never used Wordpress, you might want to familiarize yourself with it by looking at the New Users FAQ before you read further. The installation of Wordpress is well documented, so for the rest of the document, we will assume you have a working copy.

Migrate to WP

For those of you that want to utilize the plugin, but are using another platform for blogging, it is a relatively simple process to migrate your blog to wordpress.

Wordpress natively supports the importing of data from various other blogging platforms. The information on how to do this can be found on the Wordpress Site.

There are a few special cases below:

Wordpress.Com

If you are migrating from a free Wordpress.com blog, there are a few steps that are required in order to properly import into a hosted Wordpress blog, with the Revver plugin. First of all, you export your wordpress.com into a WXR file (XML file). The default import tool in Wordpress may not complete the import properly, so we recommend that you use the following tool: ZappoMan's Improved Wordpress Importer.

In some cases, you may find that the names of the comment authors do not translate, and this is due to a known bug with the wordpress.com export/import process. This may be fixed in later versions of wordpress. If you have the problem the solution is to remove the <[CDATA[    ]> tags on the comment author field before/after importing the data. A simple script for doing this after importing is located here: Wordpress Import/Export Fix Tool.

Migrating Large Blogs

We recommend that if you have a lot of data in the blog you are moving that you adjust the php.ini if possible to allow for more memory and/or longer execution time for scripts. The parameters you may need to adjust are:

upload_max_filesize

memory_limit

max_execution_time

max_input_time

post_max_size

Download/Installation

After you've got a working installation of Wordpress, you are now ready to install the Revver Plugin. You can download it here: http://one.revver.com/go/wp/

Please Note: You will need to have FTP access to your server in order to install the Revver Plugin.

Installation of the plugin is as simple as placing the uncompressed "revver" directory on your Wordpress server in the "wp-content/plugins" directory of your wordpress installation. For help on installing plugins, see the Wordpress Plugin Docs.

Activating Plugin

Now that you have installed the plugin, you must activate it. To do so, login to your new Wordpress admin console and navigate to the plugins section. Here you can "activate" the plugin.

Once you have activated the plugin, a number of new menus will become available via the admin interface.

Configuration

Before you can use the Wordpress Revver Video Plugin, you must configure it to use your username/password. The Revver Configuration page is located on the admin toolbar under the "Plugins" section. Please note: Once you select the username, it will be linked to all posts from that point forward. Changing the username after you've already created posts will break the video response functionality on all old posts and is NOT recommended.

If you do not already have an existing account with Revver, you will need to get one now. Go to http://www.revver.com to sign-up. The user account that you use will become the parent account for any new subscribers that post video comments, and all videos in blog postings will also be owned by this user, so chose your username carefully.

The Revver Plugin is not linked to any particular site's theme or design. There is nothing to stop you from creating complex and customized Wordpress installations and still retaining the same functionality as the vanilla Wordpress installation. There should be no need for any additional code in your theme, provided that you do not remove the comments or content section itself.