Hi, I wanted to add my experience to this topic. I have a video portfolio site in 7.0, and I was interested in moving to 7.1 for the overall flexibility over the design of the site. It’s much more customisable than 7.0, however I was surprised to see that the way 7.1 handles videos is not suitable for a video portfolio site at all. I think that this would be a popular use for Squarespace so this is a big problem.
As a video producer, what I want is extremely simple. I want a grid of videos, that when clicked on by a visitor to the site, open up in a full screen light box, in place, for them to view. Am I correct in understanding that this is no longer possible at all in 7.1? Most video producers that I know of all want this exact layout on their websites.
In 7.0 I could use a Gallery block to display the videos with the lightbox option selected.
In 7.1, it appears that I have to use a Summary block linking to a Videos Collections page (the Portfolio page appears to be for images only). Here are the problems with that:
- The major issue is that when the site visitor clicks on a video in a Summary block, it takes them away from the current page, to a separate individual video page (that shows the date posted, ‘You Might Also Like’ etc.). I don’t want this, I just want them to watch a video full screen on the current page in a lightbox. Why do we have to take viewers away to a separate page for every video?
- The videos collection page appears to only allow custom featured images for uploaded videos, not embedded Vimeo videos (7.0 allowed this), and uploading videos has a 30 minute video storage limit, which is not suitable for my needs. I actually don’t need any video storage, I just need to be able to put custom thumbnails on embedded videos.
- The videos collection page cannot be disabled. I don’t want site visitors to ever go there. I want a clean minimalist site in which the only place to watch videos is on a grid on my portfolio page. That’s it. Also there appears to be a technical issue here - I click the enable button to disable the videos collections page, and then when I click save I get the following error message: ‘Couldn’t update collection - category undefined is not a valid ObjectId’
- There appears to be another technical error related to embedding videos from Vimeo. When I add the video link I get green text reading ‘Video found and ready for use.’ but then once the video has been added, the embedded video window now shows the following error message ‘Unable to load video. Try again later.’. The video does play on the actual site page, but then why is there an error message here (this error message didn’t happen in 7.0).
As an alternative to using a Summary block, it’s possible just to add videos to a page individually and arrange them in a grid. This has the following issues:
- When clicked, videos play in their own tiny little frame without opening up to full screen in a lightbox. This looks really bad. On a computer, the user has the option to click on the full screen button, but this is not ideal as it doesn’t happen automatically and I’d rather not leave that sort of action up to users as they might not do it. On an iPad, the video frames are so small that there is no full screen button at all, so the user has the choice of watching the video in a tiny postage stamp size frame, or tapping the picture in picture button, which provides a floating window that is slightly bigger, but still doesn’t offer a full screen option. This is an absolutely terrible user experience.
- Videos arranged in this way lack a way to style them like when they are in a summary box (e.g. placed together in rows with no gaps between them). A video grid arranged like this simply looks ugly. Is this what Squarespace wants to be known for - ugly websites?
So in summary, in order to have a video portfolio page in 7.1, I can either:
- have viewers taken to an irrelevant page away from the main page every time they click a video.
- or have an ugly grid that plays videos in a tiny frame, with no way to go to full screen whatsoever on iPad.
This is frankly terrible, and makes Squarespace 7.1 a bad platform for a video portfolio site. Judging from this thread people have been asking about this for at least 3 years now. What is going on at Squarespace? All of this could be solved by adding a simple lightbox feature, like we had in 7.0. Why would Squarespace remove basic functionality? The video collection page is fine for people who want it, but it's not good for a clean, minimalist portfolio.
So now I have to choose between keeping an old site design, or looking for a different website supplier, simply because Squarespace is going backwards and taking existing fundamental and basic features away.
If I’m missing something please let me know, because this just seems ridiculous.
Thanks for any assistance.
