Plumi 4.5 was soft-launched at the beginning of the year. Now that it’s been running smoothly for a while, we’d love to introduce you to all the new features and improvements.

New User Interface

The first thing you’ll notice about Plumi 4.5 is the beautiful new skin. We’ve left the old layout inherited from older versions of Plone behind. Right out of the box you will be pleased to see a shiny new visual theme, with a grid-layout and contemporary styling, just right for a video sharing site.

On the front page of the new Plumi skin you can view all the latest videos that have been uploaded, plus feature a video in the slot on top, ready to play back using mediaelement.js player – an HTML5 player that will work in any modern browser. We’re re-worked templates throughout the site, making improvements to UI, with more planned for the future.

Diazo

You can also customise Plumi’s visual theme for your own needs, and in Plumi 4.5 it is easier using a new implementation of the Diazo theming engine and plone.app theming. Diazo allows you to apply a theme contained in a static HTML web page to a dynamic website created using any server-side technology. With Diazo, you can take an HTML wireframe created by a web designer and turn it into a theme for Plumi.

Mobile Friendly Adaptive Layout

The site is designed to adapt to different screen sizes, and videos will play back on both Android and iOS devices.

New Video Publishing Form

A new video publishing form makes it even easier for users to upload video to a Plumi site. Just drag’n'drop or click browse to select a video file, and watch it upload in the new progress indicator, while you add metadata to your video.

You can click over to another dynamically loaded page as you upload, where you can categorise the film and add a Creative Commons license.

Subtitling Using Amara

We have integrated Amara (formerly Universal Subtitles) which allows users of your Plumi site to easily add or view subtitles for each video, created or attached to the video using the Amara system. Watch the video above to learn more about how easy it is to use Amara, which is a powerful addition to Plumi in terms of accessibility, and use in multi-lingual websites.

Other Improvements

Other fixes and improvements since our last stable release (Plumi 4.4) include replacing gunicorn with uwsgi, making upload of large files more stable, removing views/downloads from the <iframe>, fixing fullscreen video playback, removal of the obsolete callouts content type, and updating mediaelement.js.

Plumi Roadmap

We are looking forward to a 4.5.1 release that may include some more work on templates, followed by 4.6 in which we plan to integrate videos that are hosted on other sites, and new features designed to enhance the ability to use Plumi for social change impact.

You can read the full list of Plumi features here.

We are excited to write about www.criticalcommons.org going live after smooth cooperation between Anna Helme, Steve Anderson, Erik Loyer and Unweb.me. The new version adds significant improvements to the overall functionality and stability of the site, plus allows easy uploading of media files and commentaries.

criticalcommons.org main page

Critical commons is a video site built on Plumi. It is a collaborative online teaching tool for cinema studies, and a project designed to push the boundaries of fair use in an educational context.

Critical Commons was initiated by the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts Institute for Multimedia Literacy, and was officially launched in 2009 at the Digital Media and Learning and Open Video Alliance conferences. It was originally built by EngageMedia and Infinite Recursion on an earlier version of Plumi.

Functionality

Further plans

Future plans for development include the addition of user channels, better integration with social media and use of Popcorn.js to enable time-based interactive media.

We would like to thank Steve Anderson and Critical Commons for giving us the chance to participate on such an interesting and inspiring project.

On Critical Commons an educator can upload clips, attach commentaries and build lectures based on these clips. Other users can add commentaries to existing clips throughout the library. Clips can be embedded on other websites, and the site also forms a media repository for the Scalar open-source media-rich scholarly publishing platform.

Critical Commons is a non-profit advocacy coalition that supports the use of media for scholarship, research and teaching, providing resources, information and tools for scholars, students, educators and creators. Critical Commons also functions as a showcase for innovative forms of electronic scholarship and creative production that are transformative, culturally enriching and both legally and ethically defensible. At the heart of Critical Commons is an online tool for viewing, tagging, sharing, annotating and curating media within the guidelines established by a given community. (www.criticalcommons.org)

Critical Commons was initiated by the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts Institute for Multimedia Literacy, and was officially launched in 2009 at the Digital Media and Learning and Open Video Alliance conferences. It was originally built by EngageMedia and Infinite Recursion on an earlier version of the Plumi free software video platform.

Currently I’m working here in Athens with Unweb, in collaboration with Steve Anderson and Erik Loyer from Critical Commons, to produce a new version of the website based on the latest version of Plumi. Code we develop will be available on the Plumi GitHub repository.

In the coming weeks EngageMedia is undertaking a re-design of our video-sharing website focused on social justice and environmental video in the Asia Pacific. We have been limited in terms of our design to something close to the look of an older version of the Plone content management framework on which Plumi, our free software video sharing application, is based. Changes we are working on now in Plumi are enabling us to separate the design from the content management system, and have a freer approach to create the kind of user-interface people expect from today’s online video applications.

We’re using Diazo to re-theme EngageMedia.org and Plumi. Diazo “allows you to apply a theme contained in a static HTML web page to a dynamic website created using any server-side technology. With Diazo, you can take an HTML wireframe created by a web designer and turn it into a theme for your favourite CMS, redesign the user interface of a legacy web application without even having access to the original source code, or build a unified user experience across multiple disparate systems..”.

I’m currently in Athens with Unweb. It’s very hot in Athens, but we’re hiding inside from the heat, getting deeper into the new design and functionality required for our new look. I’m here working with Dimitris, Christos and Markos from Unweb. Yiannis, our designer and front-end developer has joined us in Athens, and is now working with us from the Netherlands. Mike from Unweb has come to work with us this week.

Unweb are not only great programmers, but excellent cooks! As is their housemate Nikos. We will have produced a lot of code and consumed a lot of food by the end of our sprint

Why Athens, you may ask? Well, Unweb are based in Greece. Lucky for me!

Normally we work together online, but I happen to be here in Athens to work with them on another project based on the Plumi video-sharing app, called Critical Commons. This is an online cinema educational tool originally built by myself, Infinite Recursion and EngageMedia for theInstitute for Multimedia Literacy at the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts (a project developed by Steve Anderson and Erik Loyer). It’s also a project designed to push the boundaries of fair use in an educational context, challenging the legal limitations copyright places on distributing film clips online. It also forms the multimedia backbone for Scalar, an open-source platform for media-rich scholarly publishing.

For the EngageMedia re-design, we’re also looking at re-engineering the way video activists interact with the site, in terms of building better steps towards activism and advocacy into the user-interface. Basically we want to encourage users to take the next step after watching a video – whether that’s finding out more info on the issue, taking part in discussions, finding others who are active around the issues and taking part in social movements, and/or taking direct action. This will all happen in the next stage of the re-design.

For now we’re focusing on a new skin for EngageMedia.org, from which we will base a new Plumi skin, available for all to download, modify and use for their own video-sharing sites.

We’ll keep you posted in the coming weeks…

This version updates Plumi to Plone 4.2. Changes include deployment as a WSGI app and asynchronous execution of jobs via plone.app.async, separating the video uploading process from the database, which should mean stability improvements in the uploading system. The load balancer has been removed, buildouts have been simplified, and the beta also includes a new publish form with a video file upload progress indicator, a big step forward in terms of usability.

4.4-final includes some changes after the beta to the transcoder, the new video publish form, and fixing bugs with playback on the iPhone and iPad (playback now works very well in the latest iOS).

See the changelog here:
http://plone.org/products/plumi/releases/4.4-final
or via:
http://pypi.python.org/pypi/plumi.app/4.4

The installation procedure and install.txt for Plumi has changed since the last stable version 4.3.1, you can find it here:
https://github.com/plumi/plumi.app/blob/master/docs/INSTALL.txt

The changes can be seen in action at http://demo.plumi.org.

This release was brought to you by Unweb.me (https://unweb.me) and EngageMedia (https://engagemedia.org).

See the changelog here:
http://pypi.python.org/pypi/plumi.app/4.4b1

You can download the package from:
http://plone.org/products/plumi/releases/4.4b1
or via:
http://pypi.python.org/pypi/plumi.app/4.4b1#downloads

Please download and test the beta. The install.txt has changed, you can find it here:
https://github.com/plumi/plumi.app/blob/master/docs/INSTALL.txt

The changes can be seen in action at http://testing.plumi.org.

This release was brought to you by Unweb.me (https://unweb.me) and EngageMedia (https://engagemedia.org).

See the changelog here:
http://pypi.python.org/pypi/plumi.app/4.3.1

You can download the package from http://plone.org/products/plumi/releases/4.3.1 or via http://pypi.python.org/pypi/plumi.app/4.3.1

The changes can be seen in action at http://demo.plumi.org or with a different skin on the EngageMedia site http://engagemedia.org

See closed tickets for this release on the Plumi tracker.

• online subtitling support using Universal Subtitles
• html5 support using webm and mp4 (high res and standard transcodes available) makes page loads massively faster – no more flowplayer.
• all transcoded versions are available for easy download
• better and more reliable support for 16:9 video
• sort and find videos by language
• play count on videos is now counted when the video is played embedded on another site
• updated to Plone 4.1
• replace collective.piwik.flowplayer with collective.piwik.mediaelement
• Video transcoding progress indicator for site admins

For a full list of changes please see the changelog.

You can download the package from http://plone.org/products/plumi/releases/4.3-Final or via http://pypi.python.org/pypi/plumi.app/4.3

The changes can be seen in action at http://engagemedia.org and http://demo.plumi.org

Thanks to Unweb.me, Rok Garbas and Anna Helme for getting us across the line and producing the best Plumi release to date.

The beta includes updating to Plone 4.1.2, support for 16:9 video transcoding, webm transcoding, replacement of Flowplayer with mediaelement.js HTML5 player, video language added to metadata and support for the Universal Subtitles platform.

Also updated is the INSTALL.txt with the new installation how-to.

Please install, test and get in contact with us via the email list if you find any bugs.

Here are the changelogs for plumi.app and plumi.content:

• added mkv and wmv files to cache exceptions [clopy]
• moved repo to github [garbas]
• added support for 16:9 transcoding, updated ffmpeg version [clopy]
• removing propertiestool.xml – functionality was moved to other packages [garbas]
• publish link should be part of desgin (moving to plumi.skin) [garbas]
• removed boilerplate code [garbas]
• added iw.debug into devel.cfg [garbas]
• update to Plone 4.1.2 [garbas, dimo]
• add publish and notifyMemberAreaCreated via portal_skins (from plumi.skin) [garbas]
• added webm transcoding support [clopy, cpsaltis, dimo]
• updated transcode script to catch odd resolutions [clopy]
• update thumbnail generation script for 16:9 [clopy]
• replace collective.flowplayer with collective.mediaelementjs [clopy, dimo]
• replace collective.piwik.flowplayer with collective.piwik.mediaelement [dimo]
• add plone.app.theming support & update lxml [dimo]
• pump up versions of external tools [cpsaltis]
• add vocabulary and index for video languages [clopy]
• update installation method and docs [dimo]

https://github.com/plumi

We are currently working towards a Plumi 4.3 beta release, including support for Universal Subtitles, 16:9 video and an HTML5 video player (with auto fallback to Flash video support for older browsers).

You can check out the development tracker here.