If you spend an hour or so putting together a short animation that encapsulates the deep foundations of your work, you might be excused for feeling a bit cheesed off when Joomla! repeatedly "loses" the embedded vid from your article.
I had uploaded the video to YouTube, whence it can be safely embedded into anything (I thought).
But Joomla!1.5 had other thoughts. Oh yes.
Joomla! was happy for me to click the "embed" button (the one with the piece of filmstrip for an icon) , enter the URL and size information, tell it I'd like it right-aligned so the text can wrap alongside it, embed it inside a table so I get even more layout control, and even preview it showing the lovely video in context in the article.
But there's clearly something evil lurking under the "Save" button in Article Edit. When you click that button, all is saved, except your video. Gone. Pining for the fijords.
A quick bit of googling shows that this is a common problem and most answers were along the lines of "turn off WYSIWIG". Given that I'm a non-techie (see, it says in my profile, see it?) and that this blog is first and foremost for fellow non-techies who are none-the-less trying to run their own Joomla! websites, that's not an option for us. Not having to edit raw html and style sheets is the reason we wanted a CMS in the first place.
So imagine my joy when I found Cory Webb's website full of Joomla! wisdom, including a link to download his plugin which will interpret any valid www.youtube.com url and show it on yoru article as the embedded video.
The only thing I had to do was edit the url: being in the uk, I get uk.youtube.com - changing it to www.youtube.com was easy and worked straight away.
It works inside tables, so putting it to the side with text next to it was easy. The only thing I'm not happy with is that you end up with YouTube's classic "8 other videos, funnier and on OUR website" so the risk is that viewers, who are a fickle lot, let's face it, will wander off rather than read my article and buy some real teambuilding.
The answer to that is to host the videos on my own site. There's plenty of room - my vids are small punchy home-made cartoons. As long as I don't find out that to do it Joomla! requires you to publish your website in Swahili and angle your computer at 37 degrees while typing...
'Til next time
Dave
My site is here.
Joomla! is based here.
In case something's gone wrong by the time you get to my site, here's the cartoon:
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What I do for this situation is create two super-user log-ins: one with WYSIWG enabled and another without. When I want to cut/paste something from YouTube or embed a flash file I log in under my 2nd identity and wham-bam no problems. (But I did forget to set permissions to allow myself to add stuff so look out for that too.)
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