Forum layout and structure

Or the closest to. :slight_smile:

A post was split to a new topic: Facebookā€™s annoying auto-playing video embeds

(not sure if this should be here or somewhere else?)

@SIGSTART when you have a spare few minutes eventually, could you look at maybe adding an Events Calendar plugin to the forums? Something that we can use to track scheduled events, MEWME evenings, League races, birthdays, etc. Found this one on the Discourse plugins page, for example:

And also, while youā€™re fiddling around in the back end, any chance of making the default size of YouTube embedded videos a little bigger? Or even better, fluid?

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Sounds cool

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Cool, Iā€™ll take a look this weekend sometime. The Wi-Fi at this guest house is actually pretty good.

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So, about that Calendar Plug-in bossā€¦

Iā€™m guessing you found more interesting things to spend your time on at the guest house - as you should have! :wink: But how about nowish?

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Part of the issue is that installing plugins will take the forum down for awhile. Hopefully just five minutes, but it could be longerā€¦ 10 to 15 minutes.

Iā€™ll dose up on coffee tonight and do the install sometime between 22h00 and 23h00 (Eskom-willing).

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Installed. Had a bit of trouble getting the plugin enabled. There are a few bugs, especially after Discourse apparently made several changes to its core last year.

I havenā€™t tested it, but at least the button to add an event appears now, so it should work.

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I looked into making YouTube embeds look prettier. Letā€™s test if it worked:

There is an interesting discussion about this on the Discourse Meta forums, which is where I got the CSS that will hopefully enlarge YouTube embeds.

Here are a few key quotes from the discussion:

Guy who wrote the custom CSS: The real ā€œeasierā€ solution here would be for Discourse to make this the default. Most embeds (large images, oneboxes, GitHub code embeds) display full-width and making video embeds behave similarly would look better + be a lot more visually consistent.

Dev reply: A change is incompatible with our view of Discourse as primarily a discussion system, not a video distribution system.

And then later another dev gives a more in-depth explanation:

I spent way too much time researching YouTube APIs, and in order to make LazyYT use better thumbnails (which can fit our 690px post width) we would have to ask every admin to signup for Youtube API keys, implement logic of falling back to the current thumbnails since old youtube videos doesnā€™t have HD thumbnails and it wasnā€™t really worth the effort. So if you just want it to look cool, just run a simple rm -rf plugin/lazyYT in the run hook in your app.yml.

Totally #pr-welcome if someone who cares about this and want to implement a better thumbnail logic to LazyYT which accounts for all the cases:

  • Admin doesnā€™t have an API key configured
  • API key is invalid
  • Video is too old
  • Video has thumbnail, pick the higher resolution one (maybe make it configurable so people can match their forum width)

Personally, Iā€™d prefer to keep the functionality of the Lazy YouTube loader, so letā€™s see if the CSS makes the thumbnails look as bad as this dev saysā€¦

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