I know many of you have been waiting so long for the upgrade of TubePress.Net. Well I must say it took some time but is finally available for download here.
Major changes:

• Supports PHP 4 and PHP 5
• Supports WordPress 2.2 and above (tested on 2.6): I actually rewrote all the code in a much efficient and better way to keep supporting future releases of WordPress even beyond 2.6
• Added the ability to save the content as pages as well as posts
• Video player customization including, border, related videos and color
• Last by not least, one of the major changes in this new release is the content customization: Added template tags in order to change the look and feel of the content inside your post or page.
• Added an upgrade function to keep backward compatibility with older TubePress versions. Since template tags were not available in older versions, so this function should take care of converting old tags into a standard template.
• Removed the ability to change the setup and layout after importing the videos. However, you can always go into Manage, Posts (or Pages) and Edit them manually.

Note that the plugin should be compatible with any other wordpress plugin available on the web since I got rid of all fancy wordpress filters that other plugins rely on. In short words, TubePress.Net is your solution to create an automatic youtube-like website using WordPress.

I can’t help it not to mention the fact that I’m working on a new feature that allows you to upload videos to youtube from your TubePress admin panel. However I didn’t want to make you wait any longer to complete it so I decided to keep this feature for the next version. Enjoy TubePress and if you find it useful and helpful it would be nice if you consider making a paypal donation to show your support.

For all those who still not have PHP 5 on their servers, I have fixed the famous
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_STRING, expecting T_OLD_FUNCTION or T_FUNCTION or T_VAR or ‘}’ on line 15 which means that TubePress.net supports now PHP 4 and above. Still working on WP 2.3 and above compatible version.

About that and since the plugin is already and open source and to be licensed under GNU/GPL, I invited everyone to help out developing this plugin. All contributions will be credited in each plugin release.
Some contributors will even be given authors permissions on this blog to write their own reviews and ideas.
By the way I would like to welcome Viljo Hakala the first contributor to TubePress.net

IMPORTANT: If you already have PHP5 on your server then you don’t need this update
Now you can download the update here

After posting the case study of my friend’s poker site in here, I got plenty of emails from people already using TubePress to post reviews about their websites and give them some comments how they could actually take advantage of the plugin to use its powerful features to optimize the performance of their site and attract more visitors.
I would like to ask TubePress.net users to post their comments and questions on this website, so that everyone can benefit from them and another thing that it would be more efficient in a way that I will be able to answer more questions instead of replying to the same question personally to each one.
As for the idea of posting reviews about websites using tubepress.net, I decided to take different samples targeting different application areas to show that how you can use this wordpress plugin to build video communities and mashup sites based on it.

That said, here’s a nice mashup site for funny videos called video humour. It’s a french site that uses TubePress.net plugin features to import videos from youtube and post them automatically in wordpress. They have imported more than 20,000 videos from youtube in a couple of days. We will see if they will succeed to build a good community around it.

A friend of mine is building a poker community site and he wants to include a video section to include poker tournaments, famous poker games, some poker lessons and tricks. Most of these videos exist already on youtube. He knew of course about my wordpress plugin to import youtube videos into wordpress. I said, well, if you build your community on wordpress CMS, you will certainly benefit from the power of TubePress.net
Either you import any video tagged as poker or poker tournament or you could select your videos by ID and import them one by one.
I helped him with the design a little bit since I have been working on wordpress themes for a while now. So he ended up with a pretty nice website to give tips about How to play Texas Holdem
It’s worth checking it out, even those of you who already play texas holdem, it doesn’t hurt to check out some tips and videos before playing poker

I have been receiving lately a common error report, the famous T_function parsing on line 15 in class.youtube.php. TubePress was written for PHP 5, assuming that most hosting companies should provide at least PHP 5 to its customers.
Well I was wrong about that. Unfortunately, a large number of hosting companies, most of them goes under the “Free Hosting” group are still providing old PHP versions on their servers.
I recommend mediatemple, dreamhost and ThinkHost but NOT GoDaddy!

Due to this reason and the latest changes in WordPress database structure, I have decided to release an update for my WordPress plugin. The update will include a complete rewrite of the plugin, to support new versions of WordPress, maintain backward compatibility and the code will be optimized for old PHP versions.

I would like to thank you all for testing the plugin, and reporting bugs.

For all wordpress template designers, I have decided to give you the opportunity of sharing your work on this blog. The purpose is to create a template which is optimized for TubePress. As you all know, TubePress is independent of the wordpress theme used, however not all designs are good for video posting.

Those who are interested please send a copy of your template, name, blog (if you like to publish) and I put them here.

People tend to install every single plugin on the web, try it and then remove it. Most of them do it just for fun while others are perhaps trying to discover new stuff, take an idea and develop it more. That’s cool and it’s not too hard to find these plugins since there are plenty of directories dedicated for WordPress plugins, like WP-plugins.net and wp-plugin-archive.de, just to name a few. The bottom of the line, I want to share with you 7 reasons why you should install TubePress and keep it.

1. You want to clone Youtube but you can’t afford expensive server hosting. So you only need a wordpress installation and here you go
2. There are many wordpress plugins for youtube, but they work in a different way than TubePress does.
3. TubePress is independent of the wordpress template you are using. You can change the template as you wish, and nothing will affect your imported video. The reason behind this is that TubePress works on the post level. Every videos you import is written in the database as a standalone post and will adapt to any wordpress template you choose as the normal posts that you write. You can even access your video posts through the admin menu, modify it, add your review or even delete it.
4. Categories is also available as an option. You can choose to post every video in categories depending on its youtube tags (this will be modified in the upcoming version to replace categories by tags for WP version > 2.3)
5. TubePress is optimized for search engines. Since the descriptions and comments are written in the wordpress database, they are displayed as pure html code when your page is requested by the browser. TubePress doesn’t use iframes which cannot be crawled by search engines. Instead you will have every video indexed.
6. TubePress is supports adsense
7. In the upcoming version, TubePress will allow you to use your own Video Player

If this is what you want to have in your blog, then you came to the right place. Hit the Download Button at your right hand side and enjoy this wordpress plugin.

I guess everyone noticed lately that youtube changed their flash video player interface to including a menu browsing within embedded video players. This gives the possibility to browse the entire youtube website from a single player, jumping from one movie to another.
This is of course an interesting feature for viewers because they don’t need to load different pages to look at different videos, everything is accessible from a single player. However, this option might irritating for content publishers, website owner, bloggers and especially mashups builder.
If you take for example a poker blog using TubePress to post video content from youtube for a specific keyword, might be a certain poker game. Now if the show related videos option in youtube player is ON, the visitors will switch to whatever youtube menu offers.
TubePress 2.6 offers a solution to hide related videos inside the youtube player and gives you the power to offer targeted video content on your website or blog. View Live Demo

Start earning money with TubePress 2.5

The latest version of TubePress allows you to add customized google adsense code to your imported video posts. You can choose the account ID you wish, title color, background color, url color just like you do in your google adsense account.
Download the latest version of this plugin, put it on your website or wordpress blog and start earning money from the first day.

SO You really want to import any YouTube.com videos and insert it into your wordpress blog?

Youtube is one of the largest online video communities, where user can upload and share their own videos. It uses flash video (FLV) which is considered as a proprietary file format to deliver video over the Internet using Adobe Flash Player (formerly known as Macromedia Flash Player) version 6, 7, 8, or 9. Flash Video content are viewed using a flash player delivered as an SWF file. We should notice that not only Youtube are using flash videos but Google Video, Reuters.com, Yahoo! Video and MySpace also use the same technology. The BBC have recently begun using .flv based media to stream video news on their website.