Pagination on Series Pages & bulk importing existing posts

[Lawrence]

Hi Team,

I have a website that you can find an active Vlogger theme on here: http://www.tabletoptactics.tv

I am currently using ‘Blog Grid’ pages to make up the different categories of shows that I have. Here is an example: https://www.tabletoptactics.tv/battle-reports/

I would like to use the theme’s inbuilt Series playlists to display these instead, however there are several issues.

First there doesn’t appear to be any pagination available for the playlist videos. This causes problems with loading time, as categories such as the one above have over 300 videos in them.

Second, in order to import the existing video posts into the Series playlist, I am forced to add each video one by one into the post search bar under the Series Setting page. This is quite frustrating and time consuming, as I would like to be able to select entire post categories and add them to a Series play list quickly, rather than one by one.

Are you able to guide me on how to create pagination in a Series playlist and how to bulk import existing videos posts into a series?

I particularly like the series page as it’s customised header allows me to describe a page and category better, not to mention using a series carousel on the front page would then be cool.

Look forward to hearing from you!

• This topic was modified 5 years, 5 months ago by Lawrence.

[themes2go]

Hello lorielb,

I’ve just answered you via private mail.
As I stated in the email, I think that the pagination issue is easier to include in the theme than the category post bulk importer for series.

I’ll go discuss with our developers and I’ll keep you posted on this.

Andrea

[Lawrence]

Thanks Andrea! Look forward to hearing what you guys come up with.

Best,

Lawrence

[themes2go]

Hello Lawrence, I’m Igor, developer of this theme.
I’ve been checking your request and your website, and I see your category page is actually displaying the pagination.

Did you modify the global theme/wordpress setting or edited the curtom file to change it, therefore found already a solution yourself, or do you still want some help to achieve anything?

Thanks and have a nice day!

[Lawrence]

Hi Igor!

Thanks for getting back to me. Actually the Category pages I have aren’t ‘Series’ Play List pages, but rather ‘Blog Grid Archives’.

I still require pagination for a Series Page plus a way to bulk import posts (like selecting an entire post category) for a Series rather than selecting a post to add to the playlist one by one using the drop down.

Can you advice on this?

[themes2go]

Hi Lawrence, I’m Igor, My collegue let me know that I misunderstood your request, sorry.

I just finished to create a child theme for you where series have pagination.
You can download it here

https://www.dropbox.com/s/pqo9ryozg903naz/vlogger-child-pagination.zip?dl=0

Then via FTP replace your folder vlogger-child.

The 2 modified files are the function.php and single-vlogger_serie.php.

WHAT YOU HAVE TO KNOW:

1) in the file single-vlogger_serie.php you will see there is quite a lot of new code.
You don’t need to do much, but there are 2 options for you in the code.

You can change the amount of posts per page, and you can choose to show or hide the header of the page in the paginated archives > 1.

The instructions are in the file.

2) If you had customizations in your child theme’s functions.php, the only new line of code is line 10

remove_action('template_redirect', 'redirect_canonical');

so you can copy it to yur customized functions.php

3) Please be aware that the interactive cards can become heavy if you use them and you have tons of videos per card. To limit this, you have to edit the functions.php of the theme, and change line 1093

'posts_per_page' => -1,

to something more limited

'posts_per_page' => 8,

Otherwise this may totally crush your page loading.

For a stable change, you can copy entirely the function
vlogger_extract_serie_episodes that goes from line 1072 to 1148 into the functions.php of your child theme, so the change won’t be lost on updates.

ABOUT IMPORTING IN THE SERIES:
Actually there is no real limitation on the amount of vides you can have in a serie, as this field can reach 5 billion characters, meaning thousands of videos in a serie.

Anyway, the biggest issue is that series videos and categories are 2 completely different structures of data.
Series are really ment for a manual usage, and there is no real way to mutate a category into a serie.

It is possible to achieve it via custom programming, but it requires a custom plugin that uses a custom procedure to parse all the videos in a category and adds them as videos to a serie.
This means you can import videos into a category, and after importing, mutate the category into a serie.

Anyway, such type of plugin requires quite some coding, and we can’t provide this as theme support.

The custom child theme that I just made for you already costed about 3 hours of work, and can’t go any further on other coding.

If you want we can program this plugin as extra service, meaning we will need to make a quotation for the work. The cost can be something between 150 and 250$.

If you are interested, I can make a more precise calculation.

Looking forward for your feedback wish you a nice day!
Regards
Igor

• This reply was modified 5 years, 5 months ago by themes2go.

[Lawrence]

Hi Igor,

Thanks so much for taking the time to look at this for me. Understood on the custom plugin – I didn’t realise it would be quite so complicated in that regard. For now, I will make use of your child theme update instead.

Thanks so much 🙂

[themes2go]

You’re welcome!
If you have any other issues feel free to open another topic.

Best,
Andrea

[Lawrence]

Hi Igor and Andrea,

I’m sorry to re-open this topic but as it’s the same subject thread. I have now installed the Theme update you kindly created for me. I would now like to go ahead and look at you developing the custom plugin for the import of posts. How could we go about arranging this?

Best,

Lawrence

[themes2go]

Hi Lawrence and thanks for getting back to us.
The easiest way to make such a functionality, meeting costs and results, is to have a function that allows to bring-in all the posts within a category.

So, let’s say, an area of the admin where you choose an existing Serie, and an existing Category, and it automatically enqueues all of the posts within that category under the chosen Serie.

Once done, you have the ability to reorder the episodes, editing the serie.
The original order would simply be the original date of each post.

Could this be a valuable solution for you?

Regards

[Lawrence]

Hi yes, this would be exactly what I was looking for. Although I would also like a button to be able to toggle the playlist in order of date earliest to latest or latest to earliest after you’ve imported that category into the series. But yeah, pretty simple in essence I guess!

Look forward to hearing from you about making this happen 😃

• This reply was modified 5 years, 5 months ago by Lawrence.

[themes2go]

Hi, sorry for the long waiting, we are still in the middle of publishing a new theme and Themeforest is making me go crazy :/

About out plugin
“after you’ve imported that category into the serie” > MMM no, that’s very hard to do as the date is not stored in the serie, and would require a double query and much much more work.
You can, instead, choose it before importing, this is much more possible.
Also, what if a serie already has videos inside? Does this require to choose where to enqueue them? if before or after existing videos?

If for you is fine, I can start working on this tomorrow, so I can send you a demo by monday, together with a fixed price evaluation based on the effective working hours.

Thanks!

[Lawrence]

Hi! Yes that’s more than fine to choose the dates before importing 🙂 As more videos will be added to the categories regularly, I envision them just auto updating on the series Playlist.

So basically, categories will always be in order of newest post to oldest. And Series Playlist plugin will just add all the videos from the post Categories in the same order automatically whenever a new post is added to that category. Likewise if a post is removed for some reason from a category, the Series playlist should also remove it, as it should be dynamically reading the posts from the categories.

Hope that makes sense! And yes, please go ahead and start work on it. Looking forward to the demo on monday 🙂

[themes2go]

Hi, I’m already working to the list.

all the things from the first part are fine, and are options (you can choose to add posts before or after existing ones, and the order you want).

The second (Likewise if a post is removed for some reason from a category, the Series playlist should also remove it, as it should be dynamically reading the posts from the categories.)

The 2 things are NOT linked, this is impossible.
Categories will most likely become a secondary selector that you can also eliminate after importing, if you don’t need it anymore (for example).

The plugin works ONCE, when the posts are in a serie, they are statically associated to the serie, is totally impossible to do a “live merging” when you edit the categories.

So, you import them accorging to the options you can choose time by time, the videos are enqueued from a category into the serie based on the chosen order.
I can also add a Middle confirmation screen, so you can see the list of the titles before confirming the import, and I can also add a safety function to undo the import if you want.

But I can’t do a function linked to every post change that updates the category, this is tecnically a tank of a function that may basically also require a ton of CPU to run, and is not something you want in your site.

Please let me know if is still ok asap, as I’m already on the code side 😉

This is the software architecture so far

/**
*
* PART A: SETTINGS FORM
* A.0 Create admin screen
* A.1 Dropdown categories
* A.2 Dropdown serie select
* A.3 Dropdown order
* A.4 Dropdown to append videos before or after existing ones
* A.5 Button to import
*
* PART B: EXTRACT POSTS AND MERGE
* B.1 Extract posts
* B.2 Extract the previous meta field from selected serie
* B.3 Unserialise the previous meta fieldd in array
* B.4 Merge with new fields
* B.5 Display the new merged list
* B.6 Save the new meta field in a temporary post meta linked with selected Serie
* B.7 Display confirmation button (form with post id and confirmation nonce)
*
* PART C: CONFIRM IMPORT
* C.1 Verify submitted post ID and nonce
* C.2 Extract the temporary meta field with new merged array
* C.3 Extract the old meta field with old existing videos
* C.4 Swap the 2 serialized meta fields
* C.6 Link to view and edit the serie
*
*/

[themes2go]

PS. anyway, you can anytime re-run the import function for instance.
I can add a control that, when you re-import a category, you can choose to remove from a serie the post that is not within the category anymore. This would run as the function you mentioned, but we do it manually triggered, so it wont crush your server at every post save.

Can it work for you?

[Lawrence]

Hi yes, that would work perfectly for me! I’m guessing once the bulk import is done, I can also just add the latest post to the series manually anyway!

Sounds great so far 😃

[themes2go]

Yes, you can modify the serie anytime and add episodes that were not in the imported category.

The software is already at a good point
https://prnt.sc/o28rcl

I’m testing the main functionality, and will now create the backup and restoration process.

In this way, if you make a mistake, you have a button to undo the import.

ONE INFORMATION PLEASE:

In the options for the procedure, there is a field to choose the post order by date (oldest videos to newest, newest to oldest) so you can choose.

I thought this parameter would be applied also to reorder the posts that are already in a serie. So existing “episodes” will be reordered following the same order you choose for the new ones.

Is it ok or you want to preserve the original post ordering, for the episodes that are already in a serie?

[themes2go]

Hi, please download this video where I show you the plugin functionslity ( if you wantch it from dropbox video and audio are horrible).

https://www.dropbox.com/s/504es8pldw73nsm/vlogger%20converter%20test.mov?dl=0

Please let me kno if is missing any funcitonality, then , I’ll proceed with some design to make the look nicer and easier, and display the posts lists in a better way.

Also I still need to to a bit more testing for edge cases.

Looking forward for your feedback

thanks and have a nice day

[Lawrence]

Yes fantastic, that ordering of Series options is perfect! I’ve just looked at the video and the functionality is perfect Igor! Thank you very much for your hard work. I’m looking forward to using it shortly.

There is only one potential issue I have considered… My largest category has around 300 posts. Once that is imported into a series using the plugin, when going to the series admin page to add another individual post when I release one, or re-arrange those posts in the playlist, the page might have a problem displaying all of those posts? As there isn’t any pagination built into the admin page, I wonder, can it handle 300 post fields on it?

Just a thought!

Let me know 🙂

• This reply was modified 5 years, 5 months ago by Lawrence.

[Lawrence]

Just to clarify Igor, this is the series admin page I mean:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ho4sracz0jqm5c3/Screen%20Shot%202019-06-15%20at%2011.23.23%20pm.png?dl=0

Will the page be able to sustain over 300 posts on it in that playlist format? I’m guessing that a pagination might need to be built in?

Let me know!

[themes2go]

Hi
” be able to sustain over 300 posts on it in that playlist format? ”
> Yes, technically it can hold up to aroud a thousand without performance issues, after a thousands, the page may be a bit heavier, but unless your computer is very old, you won’t notice speed issues.

“I’m guessing that a pagination might need to be built in”
> This part of the theme is in reality a separate framework, that we share across all of the themes, and doesn’t have pagination for the moment.
Is something we can eventually add if needed.

Also, as you mention reordering, actually a pagination might be counter-productive.
For instance, if you have 100 videos per page, how do you swap a video from a page to the other?

And, as additional idea, I’d say if you order the videos by date, for instance, you shouldn’t need to do much ordering after the importing (unless the original posts are in the wrong order) which means it would be easier to work in another way:

1) You import the videos
2) Install the plugin to quick-edit the date from the admin category archive
3) correct the post dates to fix the ordering BEFORE importing
4) After, you import the videos > no ordering required

With wo many videos, otherwise, ordering is difficult, and pagination makes it impossible. Whil ein this way you override the problem completely.

If you link me a channel to try importing some hundreds videos as you would do, I can send you a straight test 😉

[Lawrence]

Hi Igor,

Ok great! That makes sense. I agree that re-ordering the videos over paginated pages wouldn’t work. Also as you say, honestly, I won’t really need to re-order the videos after import as I will always be sorting it from the latest video to the oldest in a blog style.

Here, why don’t you try importing my YouTube playlist of ‘Battle Reports’.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7x7No3i-dSQ&list=PLw8pVOyn9GVZ20d4OViD54o-i2377BgGq

There’s only 133 here, where on my website I have around 340, but should be a good test! Let me know how it goes 🙂

[Lawrence]

Also, I have discovered another potential problem. In the search field when adding another post, it searches by alphabetical order like this:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ytfn4sbobu8vfof/Screen%20Shot%202019-06-16%20at%2011.24.35%20am.png?dl=0

However, the problem with my particular posts is that many of them end up being the same title. For example, I might have 10 posts all named ‘Battle Report: Dark Eldar vs Ultramarines’

When using this search field, I have no way to determine which of the posts I’m actually adding. This becomes quite time intensive… What would be really awesome is if the search field automatically defaulted to the latest post to oldest. So you could just scroll down and easily find the post you just published and then add it to the playlist?

Hope that makes sense! Let me know 😃

[themes2go]

“When using this search field, I have no way to determine which of the posts I’m actually adding. ”

The solution is to use an advanced search plugin.
There are many with tons of customizations and additional fields.
Anyway, I don’t see the way this interacts with the plugin we are discussing here, translating categories is a functionality, searching contents is a completely different thing 🙂

I’m now trying to import your videos and will get back in minutes.

[Lawrence]

Ok sure, no problem – let me know how the test goes!

[themes2go]

Hi, I just did and extensive test.
I imported your playlist, then imported also another one of 240+ videos, then mixed them in a single serie, then edited.

Again please download the video, as DB makes a low res preview making my voice sound even uglier

https://www.dropbox.com/s/078mc7cibe8zhx4/vlogger%20converter%20test2.mov?dl=0

Hope you like it 😉

[themes2go]

Also, In my opinion, i would be cooler to actually split such long series in parts, as for the user it becomes easier to scrape and navigate 😉
Like podcasters actually do, even though you make series of similar contents, you can still make for instance divisions by year or season.

Actually I have been on StarcraftII for a while, and seasons was always the most useful series classification.

[Lawrence]

Hi Igor,

Just watched the demo video – it’s absolutely brilliant. Exactly what I was looking for, thank you! Agree, I will actually split the playlists down into ‘seasons’, so they won’t get so heavy all the time, but I wanted to make sure that it was capable of handling hundreds of posts.

So now that the plugin is done, how shall we proceed with delivery and payment? You would be better emailing me directly on lawrence@tabletoptactics.tv from here I think?

[themes2go]

Sure thanks, I’ll write you now via email,
thanks!

[themes2go]

PS. is for you ok or you want a fancier backend interface about the importing screens?
I didn’t add any design actually, is just pure default output…