how to add playlist

I am just trying to find out what the options are so i can figure out the best way to go about it. I am using groups to do online training for interns & i need for playlist to be agnostic about where they are & to simply work when they are referenced from other content types . It doesnt matter whether the playlist is referenced in a group post, blog post or book page, they should just work & thats the functionality that I am trying to get.

I want users to be able to easily create playlists(as in more than one per user and attach those playlists to other content types. I think views add an unnecessary middleman to the equation. If i have a Playlist content type that is referencing every video node that is included, why cant the player simply make a playlist from that? I dont want my suers creating views, I want them to be able to simply add content to playlists & and they just work.
I know this has got to be possible, mediafront is proof thats its possible, its all about making it happen at this point.

The way that MANY people doing something a certain way, doesnt mean it s the best way to do it, it just means that they haven't found a better way. Many people rode horse & buggy until the automobile became popular.

You have in my opinion, a revolutionary module, and it has the ability to do things in revolutionary ways, instead of settling on the traditional way of making playlist, u should also use that revolutionary way.

Just as mediafront can detect 1 video from a content post, it should also be able to detect more than one video from a post to include into play list
or it can simply gather import playlist from a node that is referencing other nodes. i know you can do it & when you do do it, its going to be groundbreaking.

Thats great that mediafront cant be used to play different versions of a video depending on the browser.

i already know how to create parent-child relationships & have done that. I dont see why a view should be necessary. i have parent node referencing all the child nodes, why should views have to be put in the picture when mediafront could just read it off of the node?

Views is NOT the best way to do it because views ruins the flexibility because it requires that your playlist be static or that you use arguments passed through the url which severely limits what you can do with your playlist.

Mediafront being able to being able to detect all the child nodes from the parent nodes & create the playlist is a far more flexible option. then i can attach a playlist to any content type & it will play, no need to worry about arguments or building a view or anything.

Mediafront is promoted as a front-end solution, well having to use views to build playlist is not a a frontend solution, who wants their end-users messing with views? do u? i know i dont.

I know you have got to see what i mean, dont you realize how huge this is? Dont you know that many drupal users have no idea how to even use views? VIews is a great module & has many great uses but views is a hinderance in this case.

You can make it an option for presets, to either detect many versions of the same media file or to build a playlist. I know you have seen your forums & the issue queues & you know that there is such a big demand for this feature. And Mediafront already has the capability, well let it realize its potential. This would be a GREAT FEATURE,

Building from nodes is how Drupal was intended to work, thats why CCK is in core, not views. Everything shouldnt have to be a view, especially when it doesnt have to be. I mean we got Mediafront, why do we need views when media front is more than capable of doing it on it's own? Why let views get in the way?

if you make it so that mediafront can draw playlist from nodes, i will do a screencast demonstrating how playlist from nodes far surpass doing it from views. Just do it for a trial. If you are not convinced afte that, then remove the feature.

if this is such an amazing pattern why are you requesting for an implementation and not providing an implementation to prove it.

Because I am not a developer, otherwise i would have rigged it myself.

IMO the pattern travist has offered is far superior in flexibility; CCK and Views are (particularly at this juncture) married for all intensive drupal site building purposes.

I understand why there are those who consider cck & views to be married, but even in the instance of marriage, its is common for a spouse to work independently as well. Kobe Bryant's wife isnt dunking any basketballs. Steve Jobs wife isnt giving any keynote addresses. Marraige does not mean that one cannot be present without the other.

I can understand the hesitance from trying a new pattern if the tools provide everything you need *for your particular case*; however, here is an instance where familiarity is hindering your implementation.

I find it to be quite the contrary. I have no no issue with trying new patterns, if views was the best tool for this job, I would be all for it. I use view all the time,(how could you not?) but views provides a limitation in these types of use cases. Maybe you wouldnt understand because the view implementation fits your use-case just fine, but everyone's site isnt going to be exactly like yours.
Now if you think you can use view to implement & suite my sue case, then be my guest, but i STRONGLY DOUBT IT.

VIews is not a unicorn.

and stop setting it on "works as designed", this a feature request, not a bug report.

I am not saying to make it gather the playlist from all the files on one node.

I am saying to have ti take the files from the parent node.

for example, instead of someone making one album content type and adding all the tracks directly...i am saying make an album & a track content type...put all your tracks on your tack content types, set up a relationship with the album content type....and allow the mediafront to get playlist from the album content type.(similar to your example, just without using views). i recognize your reasoning for not wanting all file for playlist to be loaded on one node. I am not saying do it that way. I am saying pull tracks from the parent content type.

i cannot get what i want with views...if i could then i would be doing it with views instead of pleading with you. Views will not allow all users to make as many playlist as they please, then attach that playlist to any node they wish....know why? because views would require arguments & that model would not work very well with arguments.

I am not telling u this without trying it first...lol.
I tied it before i even made the original post. It doesnt work, but if media front could get playlist from the parent node, it could work any & everywhere on the site without very many limitations but view would cause limitations.

the most irritating thing about some developers is....they focus too much on how they originally intended something to be used instead of focusing on how it is actually being used. Drupal is meant to be modular, modules add functionality to the core & end user decides how to use that functionality. If the developers are deciding how the end users should use something, then it places limitations on those capabilities. Some of the most wonderful things have come out of something being used outside of its original intention. You should embrace that & leave the choice up to the user.

Say i modify it, and i am able to make it work for me? what about the next person who comes & needs the same functionality. i am not a developer so there is no way i could be a maintainer for such a module.

Do you think views was originally intended to be used for playlists? Its possible but i doubt it, but yet somebody figured out a away to do it & there it is. ANd the same can be dont with your project, it opens up a new world of possibilities but they are being limited by this views dependency for playlists.

playlist will not just be on profiles, but be on all types of content. Views requires arguments in order for it to work properly, when using references, the arguments dont get passed.
the views way of doing playlist is dated, I dont know why people dont get it.

Once I am able to get mediafront to work how i need it to, i will be glad to do a screencast to show people how to use it.

You are asking to build a playlist based off of field instances, where if they upload multiple videos to a single field, that will be conveyed as a playlist. But MediaFront actually uses more than just a single field to build its display.

NO I AM NOT!!!! I understand how mediafront works, for you have explained it already & i comprehend english very well(I am starting to wonder if I can say the same for you). I have repeatedly said that that is not what i am asking for. Have you even read anything that I have said? I have said repeatedly that I want Media front to gather its playlist from A PARENT content type that is REFERENCING other nodes. So instead of creating a view and using relationships to build a list, you would media front would gather the playlist by scanning the parent node and adding a media file to the playlist for each node that is being referenced. There would be no need for Mediafront to do any querying because the query would already be done. Does Mediafront have to query when it draws media from one node? Then it wouldnt have to query in this case either. LOL. What be be important is what fields are being made visible in the teaser(or whatever buildmode a person is using to reference the child node).

These would be the requirements for the playlist in my use case.
Any user could create a playlist
Any playlist can be referenced & displayed on any content type.( For example if i was writing some directions using the "book page" content type & I wanted to display some videos that would demonstrate those directions. I would add each video to the video content type, reference those videos in the playlist content type. and then reference the playlist in the book page content type & the videos.

You say that this can be done with views but i strongly, but try & belittle my understanding of views because my point of view differs from yours. I dont claim to be an expert on views but i have used it enough to have an pretty good idea of what it can & what it cant do. Before you try & ridicule anybody, you should atleast make sure that you completely UNDERSTAND what they are saying that way you dont come off as being arrogant & condescending with no clue to what you are addressing.

If you dont want to do it, then fine...DONT. Its a free country. Its going to get done with or without your help. Then I will show you a demo of exactly what i meant because apparently you were unable to grasp the concept from my typing. From watching your demonstrations & videos on Mediafront, I was under the impression that you were a guy who really cared about the end-user experience & you had mentioned that you would like to see the adoption of mediafront spread through out the drupal community. Not everyone in the community is a fan of having to create a view for everything & there should be alternatives.

I give you great credit for you development of mediafront for it is a great project, but even great projects have room for improvement so that they may be even greater.

It would be nice if you would address what I have ACTUALLY SAID, instead of YOUR ASSUMPTIONS of what you THINK I am saying.

I didnt take it personal. I just noticed unneeded comments in your debate(if thats what you were doing). Many of your responses weren't really addressing my request, but maybe the requests that you have gotten in in the past & you assume that i was making the exact same request. this isnt the first time that i have recommended a feature for a module & they have chosen not to include my feature for whatever reason, but atleast I didnt get the same condescending vibe that i was getting form you. If I was wrong, then i can be accountable for my error. I find your last response to be perfectly acceptable & its makes alot of sense.

One of the things i noticed when i was trying to set up mediafront with views is that the fields that you make available in the teaser really matter. So i figured that I could do the same with the nodereference. Since Mediafront has the capability to detect media, it think it would help if it could detect groups of cck fields provided by the nodereference and if it would know that everytime it came across the title field that it represented a new item in the playlist. so that all fields following it would apply to the new item in the playlist until it came across another title field.

i am a little iffy about using a patch for the views_attach module because my site is currently in production now. and i would rather just use a viable alternative until things can be corrected but i need this functionality like yesterday.

travist,
When i use nodereference, the nodes are already being loaded(maybe its different for you), so i doubt that it would require calling node_load, all that it would require from mediafront is the ability to seperate & tell the differences between nodes.

I think you are imagining this process to be far more complicated than it has to be. Does media front have to call node_load when it detects the media from one node? If not why would it in a case where it is detecting media from a noad reference that is already exposing the fields necessary for mediafront to add an item to the playlist?

if i expose all cck fields necessary to for the nodereference for mediafront to detect all media files, then I dont see why it would require node_load. It doesnt have to be has complicated as you are making it. Let nodereference & content do all the heavy lifting...all mediafront has to do is detect media.

Travist,
I use nodereference all the time & I know that it is very configurable, you can get the fully loaded node if you wish, just the teaser or any custom build mode that you may create(using a module like display suite). I have alteast 3 content types on my current production site where i am utilizing this functionality, if you would like for me to show you a demo, I will be glad to.

On top of that you can customize which fiedls are available for each Build mode(i know you know about this because you have even talked about it in your video).

How much have you actually played with nodereference for D7?

Here is a short video i made just showing how to the "render" functionality works with nodereference.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpUoVNt8O4s

ok. I will play with it to see how it works a little later on to see if it works like i need it to work. Thanks for atleast investigating the situation. I can respect that.

After checking out your feature, I must inform you that i have already tried it this way & thats how i know that its not going to work. I guess I will have to do a few more videos to demonstrate what i am attempting to do so that you have a better feel for why i need it to work a certain way. This way would work many people, not for my use case.

I will produce a video to demonstrate what i need.

In this video, hopefully I explain alot better what we are looking to do and why your views solution does not cut it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rq8mqVeSgcg

Travis,
Have you been keeping up with the SPACES D7 thread? If you have, YOU WOULD SEE MY NAME ALL OVER IT. I have been following Development Seed since the introduction of the Open Atrium & Aegir Projects. I know all about the features, context, spaces, purl modules amongst others. NOONE KNOWS WHEN SPACES WILL BE READY FOR D7 & i suspect that it would need a complete rewrite in order for it to fully integrate with the changes that have taken place in the D7 version of OG & even the changes that have taken place in D7 itself. I still dont get how you think the spaces module is goign to solve the problem with the reference-able(embeddable) playlists. Its not making much sense. I am not looking to limit playlist accessibility to groups or spaces. I want them to be accessible from all over the site.

THE EMBEDDABLE PLAYLIST ARE THE MAIN REASON WHY VIEWS WOULD NOT WORK. That is why I mentioned

one thing you mentioned toward the end when you said that you cannot use views because you do not want your users to have to construct a new view for every playlist is not true

If you would have taken my words in context, You would have realized that what I saying is ACCURATE because in order for the embeddable playlist to work as i need it to, it would require a view per playlist.
DO YOU GET IT NOW????

I did not just discover drupal yesterday. I guarantee you that i probably know about more modules than you do because I am not a developer so its in my best interest to atleast know my modules. Noone is telling you to re-invent the wheel, because this WHEEL HAS NOT BEEN INVENTED YET(ATLEAST NOT IN DRUPAL)

The only thing I having trouble understanding in all of this is....why is it seems like you just dont get it. No matter what I do, you just dont get it.

THE VERY CORE OF MY PROBLEM IS THAT VIEWS IS NOT FLEXIBLE ENOUGH TO SUPPORT EMBEDDABLE PLAYLISTS<---this has been my issue from the beginning. If my playlists were just going to live at the same URL, views would be fine but my playlist need to accessible from all content on the site. This is a HIGH PRIORITY.

CREATING PLAYLIST IS THE EASY PART...thats not the problem, its making them work with NODEREFERENCE thats the hard part.

I deal with your type of system everyday with my full time job, so I know it can be done so that we do not have to hack up the MediaFront module to handle a specific query that Views was built to handle. Trust me, I have walked down this road before with another module of mine, and it ended up being a nightmare.

Well if that is the case(doesn't seem to be at this point), It would be nice if you would offer something helpful instead of the same redundant stuff that you have been offering.

You seem to be completely foreign to the idea of "embeddable playlists", and the idea that you think you can simply do this via views or spaces is hurting your credibility.

The flexibility that is now available in drupal 7 due to fieldable entities & field api in core is a BIG DEAL. OG for drupal 7 falls right in line with this allowing one to make a group from ANY ENTITY(nodes, users, taxonomy, etc...). To be honest, i think all modules for d7 should provide the same kind of flexibility that allows you to use them in just about anyway you can imagine using them. Mediafront has features that would allow for this type of flexibility but they are somewhat incomplete because there are things that are acting ass barriers preventing it. I am simply trying to get you to remove these barriers so that mediafront can be used in ways that you never imagined possible.

Please ALSO UNDERSTAND, that my time offering ideas, feedback & reporting bugs for Mediafront is also a donation of my time. My frustration stems from having to repeat myself constantly. I feel that I have went out of my way to explain things to you only for you to either blatantly ignore what I am trying to say & keep insisting on the same thing or just simply fail to grasps the concept. Noone was yelling. I use caps for emphasis, not to yell. There have been plenty of times that you have implied that i do not know what I am talking about as well. I am just more direct.

True, vIews is able to handle 99% of the use cases TODAY, but drupal 7 hasn't really caught on yet & many of those who are using D7 are still operating in a D6 mindset in their implementations. I am glad that they dont take that approach with core drupal. Do you know how bad Drupal would suck if they only focused on what was okay for 99% of the use cases? Do you think 99% of the use cases for drupal are for sites that can handle 1 million unique visitors? Of course not!! Well i am glad it still has that capability. Drupal as a platform & the web as a whole are constantly evolving. You will get left behind if you settle for the way in which things have always been done. Drupal 6 alone has had so many innovations that have drastically changed the way in which things are done with drupal. These examples include drush, the features module, spaces, the aegir hosting system, open atrium, only to name a few. Mediafront also has the potential to be a pioneering module which brings great innovations to drupal. Do you think most people incorporated features in their use cases before the module was developed? Of course not, now this module plays a crucial part in the implementation of installation profiles and also development & implementation of functionality in many project. The majority of people will only operate within the confines of the methods provided to them. Its those with vision, innovative ideas & the unique ability to problem solve who help forge new methods & opportunities for the masses.

If you say its not personal, then why are you letting personal things get in the way? This shouldnt even be about how I "approached" you, but about making Mediafront as great as it possibly can be. Should I have to kiss your behind to convince you to improve YOUR OWN project? I dont like how you have approached me many times either, but here i am putting forth efforts to convey to you new ways in which your project can be used. I have already made arrangements to have the project altered for my use case but that would only benefit me. One of the core principles in Drupal is "collaboration, not competition" so I was simply offering those ideas to you, because who would be better at implementing improvements to a project than the one who developed it?

If you dont like my ideas, that is fine. This isnt the first time that someone has not liked an idea i have had & wont be the last, but my ideas have an amazing track record. Dont be surprised if the use cases begin to shift once that type of functionality becomes available. I have searched through the threads on the project page here as well sd the forums on your website & have identified plenty of people who would also benefit from this.

I have been trying to explain the exact same thing to you for 11 days. How frustrated would you be after attempting to explain the same thing for 11 days?
If even after 2 youtube videos, they act like they still cant get it? And for a follow up response to your last video, they misquote a statement made in the video as their premise to recommend the exact same solution that you spent the entire video explaining why it wouldn't work as if they just ignored the whole thing & all they could hear is that line? isn't reasonable for a person's patience to run out after a certain amount of time? if everytime it seems like we just may be getting some where, the person relapses to the exact same thing?

The fix on #1092520: Help.... pleeeeeasseeee:) Views, Mediafront, and Drupal 7. actually fixed this issue as well. Seems that the issue has nothing to do with views but everything with the problem between the media module & mediafront. The update allows the playlist to operate as desired. Its not really The way I prefer to have it setup but atleast it works now. I'll do a video to demonstrate my setup for those who may also want to implement a similar setup.

Well I am a problem solver & if there is a way to do something, I will figure out how to do it but I can only solve an issue if the necessary tools are there to solve it. Before i posted this issue, I had tried absolutely everything I could think of to get it working. This is the reason why I knew immediate what the issue was on the other ticket.

I had found it kind of insultingwhen it seemed as if you were implying that I didnt know what I was doing when i kept asking for an alternative. The issue turned out to be that I was using the media module while you were using another method so for you, it was working but for me it was not working because of the problem pointed out in the other issue. I guess it was just a misunderstanding, No big deal. I am just glad I got it working so that I can move on & deal with other things.