GizmoLA.com

Allvideos Reloaded (AVReloaded) is a really nice piece of software engineering from Fritz Elfert. Rather than hardcode for all the individual players out there, Fritz created a macro system that allows you describe the parameters for any player, so it can be configured and updated.

Like the Allvideos plugin, AVReloaded comes bundled with the ubiquitous JW Player for Flash. If you are streaming flash movies from your website, one worthwhile plugin is longtail's Google Analytics Pro. The current license price for the plugin is $19 from longtail's site. If you're already using Google Analytics, the plugin feeds "Content" events from the player to Google Analytics which will show up under the "Event Tracking" menu. Ever have questions like: "I wonder what videos people are actually watching on my site" or "for this new video, how many seconds do they watch before they get bored and close it?" If so, then this plugin is for you. The player will generate events that GA groups into 3 categories: "Video Plays", "Percentage Played" and "Seconds Played". Drilling down you get a nice list of the Videos on your site. For example, finding out that people only watch on average 10% of that promotional video for your product is probably a sign that you may need some better material. Continue reading "How to configure AVReloaded to work with Longtail's JW Player Google Analytics Pro plugin"

In the recent profile of GB4K.com, I talked about the use of the K2 component from the Folks at JoomlaWorks. While doing some customization, I decided to reverse engineer the K2 tables that are created and used by the component. I provide the diagrams for interested parties and developers looking to understand how K2 is designed. Keep in mind that these are logical diagrams, since Joomla and K2 have no intrinsic support for MySQL other than using the MyISAM engine, which doesn't support key constraints. Click on the image to get the .png version, or this link for a .pdf.

One thing I noticed about K2, is that its tree traversal code can require a lot of queries to be run, especially if you have a lot of categories. Over on the K2 forums, one K2 user with a large number of subcategories was complaining about the substantial overhead involved in displaying the top level Category for their site. With over 1000 subcategories, the site was being hammered with an equal number of queries.

This is because by default K2 will do a query for every category to find its child categories and items. Since this is a recursive problem there's no inherent MySQL solution that would allow the developers to solve this problem in SQL (like the Oracle Start With ... Connect By syntax) so it's somewhat understandable that the JoomlaWorks developers provided a short circuit mechanism into the category configuration they call "Catalog Mode". The description of this configuration flag, which defaults to "No" is:

If you select 'yes' then only the items directly belonging to this category will be retrieved. If you select 'no' then items from all sub-categories will be retrieved. Setting this option to 'no' is ideal for news/portal/magazine/blog layouts.

This setting simply shuts off the recursion behavior for the category.