Update: Please check rtMedia homepage for latest development.
We are excited to release one of our most awaited products, rtMedia 3.0 🙂
rtMedia, formerly known as BuddyPress Media, is no longer limited to BuddyPress. It now works with WordPress and later this month, will work with bbPress also. Hence the name change!
Key features
rtMedia adds a whole lot of features, some visible and some in the background, but the most important ones are listed below.
Anywhere Media
rtMedia’s media experience can be utilised anywhere on your WordPress installation.
- Anywhere Uploader can be placed on any post, page or custom post type (events, places, restaurants, etc). These post types could be created by any plugin. In subsequent releases, we’ll add the uploader to WordPress comments and bbPress posts too.
- Anywhere Gallery displays any media uploaded via the Anywhere Uploader. It could be from a page, post, post type, in a BuddyPress Activity, via a BuddyPress Profile or Group.
WordPress Integration
Now, you can display media on WordPress author pages (eg: http://example.com/author/admin/media/). We’ll be adding support for attachments for WordPress comments on posts/pages.
BuddyPress Integration
Apart from the existing functionality, rtMedia has no dependency on BuddyPress activities. That means liking, commenting, etc will work even if BuddyPress activity is disabled.
Similarly, rtMedia now does not have any dependency on BuddyPress profiles. You can choose to enable/disable it on profiles and/or group separately.
Albums
rtMedia 3.0 onwards, you can create albums even if BuddyPress is not present. Global albums can be used to define preset albums. “Wall Posts” is an example of global album. We have added an option to disable albums (just in case you don’t like them!)
So if you are using BuddyPress for the sake of albums, then you can switch back to WordPress/bbPress. Albums in WordPress can be managed from WordPress author page. In bbPress, we will soon add album management screen in bbPress profiles.
Like
A like action button has been added to media, that doesn’t depend on BuddyPress anymore. This is a feature sponsored by 优素映像 (Yousu Image).
Responsive
Lightbox/Album Slideshow works on mobiles & tablets. Video player resizing is also supported. We’ll soon be adding swipe gestures.
Privacy
Privacy continues as it were in BuddyPress Media. However, there are some changes. Privacy can be set at the time of upload. Allows true privacy on regular BuddyPress activities. It works with BuddyPress friends disabled. Also works with standalone WordPress.
Template System
Every part of rtMedia is customisable via the new template system. Although, it’d work well out of the box with most themes, you can easily customise them by copying over the /templates/ folder to your theme and modifying the files there. rtMedia will always look for the templates into your themes directory first.
Read Documentation for more details.
API Support
Every functionality is completely extensible via actions, hooks and filters. For eg, you can add custom fields, taxonomy etc at the time of upload. You can even add fields for the title or any other property via the appropriate hooks. In addition, most of the functionality can be accessed via a JSON based RESTful API.
Documentation
All the features as well as the API is being extensively documented with great details. If you find something missing or any discrepancy, please feel free to bring it to our notice.
Premium Addons
All premium addons have been updated to work with the new version. In subsequent releases, all the addons will work independent of BuddyPress and even rtMedia.
In addition, there have been a lot of changes and many new features have been added to rtMedia. Over the coming weeks, we’ll be publishing a series of tutorials and recipes of use cases. You can subscribe to get updated as and when such resources are added.
Upgrade
Though this is biggest release, we have spent more than 1 week on building a migration script that will take care of your old-data. We have tested it with different data-sets. Still, please take backup before you upgrade to rtMedia 3.0.
If anything goes wrong you can always catch us at our free support forum.
Links: rtMedia Homepage | Download | Demo | Documentation | Premium Addons
Yes! Applause for your hard work.
Thanks Nathan
I love how we can now customise templates and let users upload media from anywhere. Thanks to everyone involved for releasing such a great product!
Thanks Henry. It is not a finished system yet and we’ll be tweaking it further to achieve the best results.
After upgrading to 3.0 clicking on the images return a blank page. Also, the media page returns a blank page. Practically all album pages and images do not show the content. The migration process did not show any errors.
rtMedia works on the pretty permalink structure of WordPress. Could you resave your permalink structure and see if it resolves this. Also, could you post this in the support forum, so we can solve this better.
This has t be the worst update ever, lost everything due to this update. Get a error page when trying to view media tabs and also fails to import. Will not be using and would advise any other users to do the same, keep well clear of this rubbish resource hugging plugin!!!
Hi William,
Our release did have issues with older versions of PHP, due to which some users faced a problem migrating. We fixed that in subsequent releases.
As far as resource hugging is concerned, it is meant to add pretty advanced frontend media features for all users of a website, especially BuddyPress networks. So, that’s bound to be take up more resources than a site without the plugin.
There are ways to sort that. A simple caching plugin or a more advanced caching system can make that feel like a breeze.
In any case, we regret that it didn’t work for you. We also regret that you did not contact our support with the details of your site, so we could find out why it was causing problems for you. We’ll probably never find out whether it was our plugin or a warning, notice or error thrown by any other plugin that’s causing this behaviour.
Nevertheless, thanks for taking the effort to let us know what you think of the plugin rather than trying to work with us to improve this open source, community resource.
Maybe before making releases you should ensure compatibility issues are fixed and that such drastic measures like disabling a community based website are not needed. I have it working now but had to disable all plugins on a live site, surely there is a better way of upgrading without having to virtual shut down a live community website, hopefully future releases of the plugin wont require such measures to upgrade!
We try and account for as many environments as we can. However, we cannot account for every plugin or theme, else we’ll never be able to release. A lot of plugins can throw wayward errors or non-standard behaviour while working nicely on the surface. We cannot possibly make allowances for that in our code. That is why plugins need to be disabled, while conducting such complex processes.
We believe it’s better to put up a maintenance notice and shut down a site for a few hours, rather than leave such processes at the mercy of any variables that are not in our control and break the site permanently. We also can’t avoid making radical changes if they serve the users better in the longer run. Some inconvenience is better than perpetual nagging dull pain!
As far as data migrations are concerned, this would be the last such radical migration. We’ve started debugging and patching BuddyPress and WordPress instead of trying to go round impossible hacks. Every single time, rtMedia has only improved, with or without hiccups and our only aim is improving it further.
so I installed this new version and still obtaining a 404 error, when clicking on ‘media’ link in groups. Any suggestions what may be wrong? thanks
Hi Phil,
Check this topic, hope it will help you.
can i use this plugin to add image to comments?
Hi Ahmad,
Yes, you can add images to comments. Check this post regarding attachment support for WordPress comments.