Best Tool for User Upload Interactivity

topic posted Sun, May 25, 2008 - 12:32 AM by  → Mark
I am needing to create a simple site (not from scratch as I lack the skills and know how) that will allow me to create a few pages, but on those pages allow users to upload their own music and video. If weebly.com had the latter compatability - it'd be perfect as I love that tool... I am aware of joomla and drupal but before I dived into them to figure out if they'd even do what I want I figured I'd scope out the options.

Any suggestions?

I've examined: weebly.com, uber.com, googlepages.com, synthasite.com, wordpress.com, jimdo.com, sitekreator.com, webnode.com... none do this.
posted by:
→ Mark
Los Angeles
  • Re: Best Tool for User Upload Interactivity

    Sun, May 25, 2008 - 12:44 AM
    Try Ning.
    Not sure about adding music, but users can add photos and videos.
    www.ning.com/
    • Re: Best Tool for User Upload Interactivity

      Sun, May 25, 2008 - 2:50 AM
      Ning looks really promising - but since the site is for an opensource / non-profit effort, it would be great if there was a free or open source option.

      There seems like someone was creating a plug in for pligg last year, but i followed the thread until it ended and it was inconclusive as of last year.
      • Re: Best Tool for User Upload Interactivity

        Sun, May 25, 2008 - 12:14 PM

        I'm sure you don't want just anyone uploading stuff, so you'll need permissions. How many users?

        There are tons of options, tons of "edit-in-place" widgets in AJAX. You could accept the upload to a standard directory, and then when approved, move to a user shareable dir where Jeroen's play can access (probably from a server-built XML file - ?):

        Check out Jeroen's flv/mp3 player:
        www.jeroenwijering.com/
        www.jeroenwijering.com/

        Not sure how you're handling permissions, allowing just everyone to upload could be scary!

        Other stuff that might be related:
        ecosmear.com/relay/
        24ways.org/2005/edit-in-place-with-ajax
        • Re: Best Tool for User Upload Interactivity

          Sun, May 25, 2008 - 2:28 PM
          Yes, I want anyone to be able to upload, but I'd like approval. I actually figured a way of doing this with wordpress - but the problem was that I just couldn't get the wordpress lay out to be right.

          Basically - I am going for something very simple....

          PAGES
          Home Video Audio

          Home describes the intent.

          Video is just a string of user videos
          Audio is a string of Audio (though I'm fine if it has to be audio on a video)

          The more formats (youtube, blip.tv etc.) the better.

          I don't need people to register, they are just sharing probably a one time thing.

          For wordpress I found I could not get rid of the default home blog scroll as the center of the site while I could make the video and audio lists work and even have users link youtube videos with simple instructions.

          I tried a few sites that let you upload video and convert it, but that's really not necessary as almost anone inclined to do this kind of thing knows how to host things elsewhere.

          I'm soooooo brand spanking new to AJAX that I'm not sure how I would work those links. I must apologize in that I'm not an advanced web person, just enough to get in trouble. My own site ( www.markallen.net ) is about the only thing I've done and.... it was hard. lol.

          But I will check out your links and see what I can determine.
          • Re: Best Tool for User Upload Interactivity

            Sun, May 25, 2008 - 6:22 PM

            Wow, if you already tried it with Wordpress, you're probably 90% there, but as we all know, the first 90% takes 10% of the effort, and the last 10% uses the other 90% effort.

            WP templates are modifiable, and significantly so. I have a site, macvortex.com which uses WP, but with lots of extra plug-ins and major template mods + a lot of tweaking to certain plugins. I use one of the youtube plugins to pull specific video feeds.
            • Re: Best Tool for User Upload Interactivity

              Mon, May 26, 2008 - 1:21 AM
              Maybe you're right... I did modify wordpress for my personal site - but it was a blog and it seems hard to get wordpress to take any other shape, but I will investigate that a little.

              • Re: Best Tool for User Upload Interactivity

                Mon, May 26, 2008 - 2:26 PM

                I suspect, that if you're using a fixed page structure, you can modify the "page" template to display different options based upon which page is requested. You can do that in template, something like:

                switch ($_SERVER[’URL’]) {
                case "A":
                <html or php code for page url A>
                break;
                case "B":
                <html or php code for page url B>
                break;
                default:
                <html or php code if neither above option met>
                break;
                }

                You might need to use 'SCRIPT_NAME' instead of 'URL'. Just one idea, fundamentally, Wordpress is driven by merging what it finds in the template files (post/page, index templates) with content from the database, so you can accomplish almost anything by using the Wordpress Tags + PHP, you just have to learn the structure/tags. Wordpress template tags > codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags

                Enjoy!
              • Re: Best Tool for User Upload Interactivity

                Mon, May 26, 2008 - 7:09 PM
                You can actually recreate the entire way the pages display by choosing you "home page" to be different than the blog- ie, when someone first arrives they don't show up on the blog page. This site that i made is based on wordpress with several plugins- www.jivahealth.com

                - with the addition of goudendouche.com/2007/09/1...t-like-it/ - drop down menus
                - fluency admin skin on the back end with drop down admin menus as well as fckeditor plugin
                - for the form email: www.deliciousdays.com/cforms-plugin
                - sidebar widgets that have html code

                and a bunch of other restyling...
                now.. that is just a one user kind of thing and i'm not sure how you plan on having multiple users but the example being that wordpress can be used as a "website with a blog" and not a "blog and a bunch of other 'pages'"

                good luck
                • Re: Best Tool for User Upload Interactivity

                  Tue, May 27, 2008 - 12:34 PM

                  yep, more ideas at performancing.com/blogging-...-wordpress

                  it's a Swiss Army knife!
                  • This is the maximum depth. Additional responses will not be threaded.

                    Re: Best Tool for User Upload Interactivity

                    Wed, May 28, 2008 - 2:23 AM
                    Thanks all. Wow, for some reson I thought wordpress had sort of fallen out of favor in liu of joomla (which i did look more into.. wow, big. I'm glad to hear wp seems alive and kicking and thanks everyone for the links.
                  • This is the maximum depth. Additional responses will not be threaded.

                    Re: Best Tool for User Upload Interactivity

                    Fri, May 30, 2008 - 2:46 AM
                    So - would it be possible / feasible to have a site (with Wordpress) that has four main sections, three of which allow people to post blogs - a shared blog? Generally people will make only one or two entries ever so I was thinking I might just do it with comments. But then I realized I might want people to be able to comment on the entries.

                    I don't want anyone to be able to change the site or start their own blog and I would want to have admin approval on all entries.... feasible?
                    • Re: Best Tool for User Upload Interactivity

                      Fri, May 30, 2008 - 12:03 PM

                      Sounds like you would need to filter blog posts displayed for each "section". Probably also restrict specific users to default to a specific section tag/category for post/edit - not sure about details, could be sorta deep mod, but still should be manageable in the post/create/display functions.

                      As admin, you would still approve before submissions would be posted. You could still keep the comments feature active.
  • Re: Best Tool for User Upload Interactivity

    Sun, June 1, 2008 - 8:42 PM
    Hey...

    As long as we're on the topic, are there any good freely available php/ajax code out there to allow the uploading of multiple images at the same time?
    • Re: Best Tool for User Upload Interactivity

      Mon, June 2, 2008 - 7:45 AM
      there is no way to allow uploads of multiple files simultaneously using HTML or even Javascript. It's a security measure built into the language. You would have to use a Flash component to enable this.
      • Re: Best Tool for User Upload Interactivity

        Mon, June 2, 2008 - 11:58 AM
        you can upload several files at once using php


        <?php //uploader

        $counter = 3;//number of files to upload at a time

        if(isset($_POST['submitted']{
        if($i=0; $i<$counter; $i++){

        //create index names
        $filename='upload'.$i;

        //check for a file
        if(isset($_FILES[$filename])&&($_FILES[$filename]['error'] != 4)){

        //move the file
        if(move_uploaded_file($_FILES[$filename]['tmp_name'], "../uploads/upload_id")){//if you are allowing users to upload to a publicly accessible folder, i hope you have some sort of server-side virus scanner or something, i have never attempted to allow this. if they were to upload an executable file they could cause serious problems.

        echo '<p>File number '.($i+1).' has been uploaded!</p>;


        }else{
        //echo an error message
        }

        }


        }

        }
        ?>

        <form enctype="multipart/form-data" action="'.$_SERVER['PHP_SELF'].'" method="post">
        <input type="hidden" name = "MAX_FILE_SIZE" value="20000000" />
        <?php//the upload inputs
        for($i=0;$i<$counter; $i++){
        echo '<p><b>File:</b><input type="file" name="upload" '.$i.' " /></p>';
        }
        ?>

        <input type="hidden" name="submitted" value = "TRUE" />
        <input type="submit" name="submit" value="Submit" />

        </form>
        • Re: Best Tool for User Upload Interactivity

          Mon, June 2, 2008 - 3:39 PM
          on review this won't parse properly

          toward the beginning should say "for" (instead of having an "if" conditional at the beginning of a loop statement, whoops, typo)

          substitute a better naming procedure for "upload_id"

          toward the end the server variable would need to be included inside a call to php


          hope it's helpful anyway
        • Re: Best Tool for User Upload Interactivity

          Tue, June 3, 2008 - 4:25 PM
          Jesse, sorry I wasn't clear enough. That's not what I want at all.

          If you guys use Flickr or Facebook, I'd like a tool like that. I want a nice interface to select and upload a variable number files at one time.

          I'm an old school backend programmer, whose knowledge of frontend technology is rather limited. Are these tools based on flash?

          And do you guys know of any good toolkits/plugins that does this?

          Cheers.
          • Re: Best Tool for User Upload Interactivity

            Wed, June 4, 2008 - 12:34 AM
            As David said, you *have* to use a different technology. Flash, ActiveX, .net, or Cocoa apps have been developed to support what you want, but they are *very* specific to their backend interfaces, and in the case of Cocoa, platform dependant.

            BTW: I'd love to see someone prove me (and David) wrong on this one, but I just haven't seen anything that works.
            • Re: Best Tool for User Upload Interactivity

              Wed, June 4, 2008 - 7:22 PM
              MagicLamp and David I have the utmost respect for your web development talents so I'm wondering if perhaps I'm completely out to lunch and misunderstanding the topic. we're talking about using a website interface to upload several .jpg files at once from the visitor's computer to the server, correct? the script i posted above is a minor mod of one I have on one of my sites and i'm telling you, it uploads multiple files at once without using flash or any technology other than php and html. I know it wasn't what Adam wanted because it's just a script, it's not a prepackaged out-of-the-box solution with a gimmicky name, but if the question is, can you upload more than one file at once using php with html and no other technologies or scripting language, the answer is yes you can.
              • Re: Best Tool for User Upload Interactivity

                Thu, June 5, 2008 - 12:36 AM
                my understanding is that we are talking about multiple (potentially drag-n-drop) uploads that has no limit. What about 50 files? The script you offered (which I have taken note of for other uses) is interesting but the cut off is ~5-10 files before the user gets tired of (select file, find it, click on it, rinse and repeat).

                No doubt, allowing someone to upload multiples is good, but when it gets passed a certain number, any interface but drag-n-drop is insufficient.

                Maybe I am misunderstanding the request too :)
                • Re: Best Tool for User Upload Interactivity

                  Thu, June 5, 2008 - 11:31 AM
                  I have no desire to start a fight in here.

                  I'm sure Jesse is right, you can upload multiple files using php.

                  I was looking for a way to select multiple files at the same time for the upload.

                  And I'm sure magiclamp is right that there is no way to do that without using another technology like flash.

                  And, I'm guessing that since no one has volunteered any flash toolkits that do this, either they don't exist (have to be custom written), or no one knows of any offhand.

                  Is that about right?

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