KVS v3.4.0

23 December, 2013

1) Site UI logic has been considerably reworked, and a few important changes have been made:
- Content related to site pages and ads is no longer stored in the database. This simplifies synchronizing designs between sites, e.g. between the primary site and its language satellites as well as between development and production versions.
- Global blocks can now be used in page components. Many users faced situations when they needed to insert the category or the global stats block into site header to display it on all site pages. Before, you needed to insert the block into each page’s template manually. Now, you just need to insert it into the header once.
- Dynamic parameters for individual blocks and pages can now be configured. This lets you avoid caching issues when block or page templates need to contain data sent via a request.
- Page and template check in Site UI and in the audit plugin have been improved and optimized considerably. Now, caching issues are also detected, including incorrect session data usage and request data in instances where it will not function properly.
- In Site UI, you can now disable caching globally.
- Deleted pages and blocks deleted from pages can now be restored.
2) In ad settings, you can now assign ads to categories and countries (via GEO_IP). When you use categories for ads, the engine tries to locate any category-related content in the page (e.g. when a list of videos from a certain category is displayed, or the page itself shows a video that has categories). In these situations, the ad slot will only show ads that have any category from the page assigned to them.
3) A few key changes have been made to the player and its settings:
- Customizable HTML ads are now supported.
- You can now adjust the sizes of the player and the embed player in a more flexible way without modifying the templates.
- PNG and JPG images can be now used as popup banners, with customizable display time.
4) Posts are a new data type. These can be customized widely and can have classes. You can use posts for virtually anything: news, games and other data types that are not a KVS standard.
5) Serving speed limits for video formats now have more customization options. Now you can not just set up a fixed bitrate but a dynamic limit as well, depending on the bitrate of each individual video. You can also set up different serving speed limits for users with different statuses.
6) A group of settings has been added to the statistics module. These let you disable tracking of the data you don’t need as well as track new data, i.e. unique video and album page visits (unique IPs checked), and video file / photo album requests. In addition to enabling and disabling tracking of certain type of stats, the settings also let you specify for how long each data type will be stored. You can use it to optimize certain site blocks that are statistics-based.
7) Content statistics has been added, including ratings, visits, unique visits, file requests grouped by date or by individual video / photo albums.
8) Statistics tracking content visits by registered users has been expanded. Now you can see video file and photo requests, while previously you could only see viewing page visits.
9) Publishing year was added to videos, and ranges can be now used for sorting and selection.
10) The backup plugin was rewritten; now you can schedule regular backups. New settings let you enable monthly backups for the past year, weekly backups for the past month, and daily backups for the past week.
11) Integration with Segpay payment processing for purchasing tokens was expanded. One-click purchases are now available.
12) Storage groups for individual videos and albums can now be manually changed on the editing page. Previously, you could only do that via mass editing.
13) You can now set storage groups during manual content creation and importing.
14) When using remote CDN servers, you can now check them for free space by generating a file of a special format in the server’s file system.
15) In photos, the 150-character description length limit was removed.
16) During manual screenshot creation, you can now set up first screenshot offset. Previously the offset was taken from content settings. Additionally, slower screenshot creation is now disabled by default and can be enabled manually. You may want to avoid using slower screenshot creation with longer videos.
17) In the administration panel, video and album lists now feature a filter showing content uploaded by webmasters.
18) In the administration panel, video and album lists now let you show directories.
19) In the administration panel, video and album lists now feature searching content using comma-separated IDs.
20) In trailers, minimal 5-second limit for each trailer part was removed.
21) In export feeds, exporting customization fields is now supported. Now you can also generate a list of deleted videos as links to their pages.
22) In rotator settings, you can now disable screenshot forwarding on mouseover so that users only see 1 screenshot.
23) Ctrl-S is now supported in all locations where it was not supported before.
24) In storage server settings, you can now disable streaming tests. This can be useful for servers that do not return correct content-length headers, which would bring about streaming errors.
25) In the album_view block, you can now set view limits, similar to videos.
26) Yet another pagination improvement. Unlike it was done before, unknown parameters are not added to page URLs. This feature will not be automatically enabled after you update. Please contact the support department to have it enabled.
27) A group of parameters called show_comments was added to list_videos, list_albums and list_content. These let you display several most recent comments for each list element.
28) In the list_videos and list_albums blocks, the var_mode_related parameter was added. It lets you change the logic of related content dynamically. Thus creating templates becomes easier if you intend to show tabs with related content by different criteria.
29) In search_results, you can now select the number of search results to be used in the filter (number of found videos, albums, or both).
30) The search_results block now lets you set minimal request threshold; search requests will not be shown until it is reached.
31) List_comments now lets you display names of anonymous users who commented, as well as users country.
32) Sorting by total comments was added to the list_members block. Also, string search now includes country names.
33) In member_profile_view, you can now display the date when users became friends.
34) The list_messages block now has a folder called invites that shows only friendship requests.
35) The bugs that have been fixed:
- Using non-standard CSV format during import.
- When external search was used, the number of search results would not be tracked by the search stats.
- Some temporary rotator files would not be cleaned up, which would sometimes bring about file system issues with large site traffic.
- Incorrect content was shown when users logged in after password restore.
- The administration panel would not allow uploading JPEG images.
- In video formats, the source file flag could not be set for formats from a standard and a premium groups at the same time.
- The category match plugin would not process tags with spaces.
- The backup plugin created backups with incorrect file access permissions.
- When downloading files during import, zero file size check would not be made.
Installations of KVS 3.4.0 will begin Dec 26th, 2013.
In future plans...
Conceptual changes in the way video and photo galleries work. Universal grabber support for grabbers that will receive page URLs and return video / photo album data, which will let import this content to the site.
CDN invalidation for video screenshots.
Content data quality: more requirements and limits in the administration panel and on the site, e.g. min and max title and description length etc. Our direction is unifying these features and introducing a universal page with all the settings.
Conceptual changes in the way custom fields work, more features for improved usability.
New feature letting you mass edit video and photo album data via the import system. One of the import fields needs to contain video or photo album ID while other fields contain customizable data.
Import / export of videos and photo albums will support all content provider, channel, and DVD fields, and their groups as well. Thus, if DVD objects are used as seasons and DVD groups are used for TV shows, you will be able to run a single import operation importing all episodes, all season-related data plus all TV show related data without having to process these objects manually.
Changes in the way iframe embed codes work. Now, iframe embed codes are generated by site pages which offers a lot of customization options. However, in-depth statistics and white / blacklists are not currently available.
More usability improvements in the administration panel. Save and open next action support for all lists, not just videos and photo albums. Deleting objects from their editing pages. Deleting categorization objects together with content.
Mass import, export and editing of categorization objects.
Creating a scheduling plugin that will publish content using daily content amount settings.
User blacklist.
Tons of other major and minor improvements are coming, stay tuned for further updates!
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