Thread

I would like to know if anyone has experience with allowing visitors to upload comments in the form of audio (or even video clip) file format?

If I wanted to allow that on IT Enquirer, would I be able to integrate it with EE? Or would I have to resort to scripting a form, with no integration or management abilities in EE whatsoever?

And to make it a bit more difficult, I do mean without having to program the whole thing in PHP, as my programming skills are nil.

This won’t be the answer you’re looking for, but hopefully it guides you to a resolution.

I have never done this, but take a look at http://www.train-ee.com/courseware/free-tutorials/comments/28-beginning-the-expressionengine-podcast/

And maybe edit the comment form to take their name, comments and a field to upload an mp3 file. As far as recording straight to the website, I am unsure of that.

Another thing to look at is http://www.train-ee.com/courseware/free-tutorials/comments/30-hooking-up-the-wimpy-player-in-expressionengine/

They are both meant to be within the CP, but you could make them Stand-alone forms.

Hmm, not exactly what I am after.

The trainee files describe how to do it being the publisher; I know how to do that and much easier than in the example (but does require either Flash or QuarkXPress 8).

What I want to do is let people comment by uploading audio and video clips instead of just typing comment text. Unless I’ve misunderstood completely, neither post you mention discusses how to do that…

I personally think it’s impossible without some serious scripting or programming, but it never hurts to ask…
Thanks for your input, though.

Maybe this is over-simplifying but couldn’t you just let people paste html into their comments with YouTube/Vimeo/insert_video_service_here embed code into their comments? Of course you’d have to allow that in your comments…

If you want to actually let them upload to your server you’re taking on a pretty complicated task because you’d probably want the video in FLV format (for Flash) which means that to be of any use you’d need to encode video on the server which is a huge can of worms you probably don’t want to open up. I thought about it on a current project and went with using Flickr instead to host the video (for members, not visitors, and not in comments) specifically so we don’t have to deal with video encoding.

Also - adding custom fields to comments is not something you get out of the box with EE so if you wanted something other than allowing users to paste in embed code from YouTube/etc then you’d need to write your own plugin/extension for allowing custom fields in EE. I haven’t researched this but this forum post from last month says custom comment fields aren’t available by default:

http://ellislab.com/forums/viewthread/104291/#525263

Thanks for the comments, folks. After reading Chad’s thoughts, I think I’ll buy the idea…