Viddler

As you have no doubt already noticed, some things have changed here on Viddler. Some of the changes we’ve recently released are visual – while others are not so visual. So that’s what we’re here to tell you about – the stuff you may not know we’ve updated.

Oh, I know what you’re thinking. The navigation has changed! And yes, it has. We have an entirely new, thinner, easier-to-use, navigation menu system. We love it we hope you do too. But I’m not going to tell you any more about it since Andrew Smith, our Lead Designer here at Viddler, is working on an extra special blog post about the new navigation system.

What else has changed? As a point of reference this version, which we internally refer to as 2.45, had over 42 separate tickets (or tasks, bugs, features). Here are some of the highlights:

A number of API updates. For all of you Viddler Developers and Viddler Business clients – these updates to our API are a welcome one. We’ve added a few arguments to help you filter results using our API. First, getByUser now accepts tag filtering! This makes is much easier to find specific videos from within a user’s account. Both getByUser and getByTag now have a sort argument that allows for sorting results by two main data points: views and date uploaded.

Our Partners are getting a few really great updates to our Advertising capabilities. You may have noticed we have a new ad unit on some of the pages here on Viddler, but we also have markedly increased the number of ad units that we can support in our video player. Pre-rolls, post-rolls, 20% overlays and more are now available to our Partners and Business clients. If you’d like to inquire about these units please contact support. If you’d like to purchase some adverts – see our Advertising page.

The updates to the API and our players have also trickled down into our Viddler Vidgets (the easiest way to create a site widget for Viddler!). Now you can filter by tags on a username, sort by views or uploaded date, and many more new features have been added. There is even a new style for the list view. We have another update to Vidgets coming out soon – so please stay tuned for that.

CAPTCHA! We know how much the spam that you’ve seen on Viddler has put you off. It has put us off too. We’ve got a several-step plan that we’re working on in order to eliminate the vast majority of spam here on Viddler as well as making it even less likely that you’ll see it at all. The first step in this plan has been to add captcha, or a service that forces you to type in a few random words to validate that you’re a human, to our forums and messaging services.  This is not a permanent feature but we’ll be leaving it in place as we work through the rest of our plan to help out with the spam.

We have done several updates for our Business clients including automatic invoicing, enhanced privacy features, the first step into much more rich statistic analysis, and other key features that our Business clients have been asking for. Each of our releases will always address the needs of our Business clients to the best of our abilities and we’re happy that version 2.45 of our platform has addressed more of their needs than ever before.

Although not related to this release I thought it important to mention that the Viddler WordPress plugin is now on the official WordPress plugin directory.  This means that you can install and update our plugin from within the WordPress admin! Oh, if you’re inclined to rate our plugin 5 stars we wouldn’t be against that.

As was mentioned we have made a number of smaller updates that you may never notice – but we’re happy to have squashed those bugs for you. Until our next update, thanks for using Viddler.