Category: Featured Video Plus

I just published a long awaited update to my WordPress Featured Videos plugin – get it on WordPress.org.

The plugin  has over 10 000 active installs (thanks dotorg team for finally showing numbers like that!) and nearly 60 000 downloads with an average of ~70 daily. The ratings are close to perfect: 46 in total, all 4 stars or more. 41 of them give the highest possible rating of 5 stars. A smooth workflow and  sticking to the native WordPress UI experience seems to be paying of. The bugs mentioned in the 4 star ratings should be fixed in this version, lets see if some change their rating. Only thing not fixable: The plugin still does not work with all themes out of the box. No workaround here. I even have been in contact with the Genesis Framework guys in order to try to enable automatic integration with their themes – sadly I haven’t been able to resolve it. Update: Check out issue #5 on the plugin’s GitHub repository for details.

This release brings a massive code refactor and introduces support for all media providers also supported by the WordPress core. There is a detailed list in the WordPress Codex, to name a few:

• As before: Local Media, YouTube, Vimeo, DailyMotion
• SoundCloud & Mixcloud
• Kickstarter (yay!)
• Spotify (plays inline if users are logged into the Spotify web player)

2.0.0 also drops support for all WordPress versions lower than 3.7. With future releases I will support versions of WordPress which are also still on the official list to probably get security updates:

Previous major releases from 3.7 onwards may or may not get security updates as serious exploits are discovered.

Due to some hassle with svn (I normally prefer git for version control) there was a quick 2.0.1 follow up. Additionally I just pushed 2.0.2 because I ran into some variable undefined warnings while previewing this very post.

Leave feedback below or in the FVP support forums on WordPress.org! See the plugin in action on Featured Video Plus on yrnxt.com.

Edit: Another update, 2.0.3. Fixes a bug caught by a user which resulted in a syntax error in old PHP versions.

Yesterday I just released version 1.9 of the Featured Video Plus plugin. By now the plugin was downloaded over 21,000 times from the WordPress.org plugin repository and got a 4.9 (out of 5) star rating with plenty of positive feedback! Thanks to all the users!

Version 1.9 replaces the Video.js local video player with the WordPress native MediaElement.js player. While this means less clutter for the plugin and a more native feel it also breaks local video support for installations running WordPress 3.5 or older. On the other hand: No need to update the plugin if you do not upgrade your WordPress installation anymore!

Second big update is the Spanish localization! Maria from WebHostingHub.com contacted me around two month ago and was happy to translate the plugin. Thanks!

I just released 1.7 of my featured video plugin. This brings two big new features to make the plugin more flexible and cut load times: Instead of replacing featured images with their corresponding featured video directly you can now make them clickable to either open a lightbox (using jQuery DOM Window) or replace and autoplay the image just then. Both of these features rely on AJAX and therefore lower the initial load time of the page. This is especially interesting with blog index pages where plenty of posts + videos need to be loaded.

Also Jinson Abraham just released a beautiful video blogging theme called Garvan which relies on my plugin! Get Featured Video Plus 1.7 now at the WordPress Plugin Repository.

Next releases will focus on enhancing Shortcodes and supporting more video providers. Furthermore I will add a overlay for featured images to indicate that they link to featured videos. If you have any requests leave a note in the comments or in the support forum.

Today I release Version 1.6 of the Featured Video Plus plugin. While this update does not bring any major new features, it fixes quite some annoying glitches which makes it bigger than just a quick bugfix release as 1.5.1.

On the settings page there is one addition each to the YouTube and local video player options: enablejsapi (which on the backend also adds an playerapiid when enabled) and use featured image as video thumbnail. For developers there is now also an unique id for the YouTube Player iframe (fvpid + {$post_id}). Also you can now retrieve the url for the video using get_the_post_video_url and filter the get_the_post_video output using get_the_post_video_filter. Furthermore I resolved some glitches reported in the support forums, thanks!

It is now also possible to embed YouTube videos which might be blocked in your webserver’s country. I am looking at you, Gema. While the featured video input field will have a red background (which signals that it could not access the API for the specified video), the video will still be embeded – only without some meta informations and no pulled video thumbnail.

1.4 seamless integrates the new WordPress 3.5 Media Manager into the local video embed process. Further more customization options are introduced: Use time-links not only for YouTube but also for Dailymotion, let your videos auto play when they are displayed in single post/page view and specify your Dailymotion Publisher Syndication Key. Also your local videos are now saved domain independent – this means they won’t break when you move your blog.

As developer you now also have access to two new PHP-Functions for accessing the featured video’s images:

get_the_post_video_image()
get_the_post_video_image_url()

Version 1.3 of the Featured Video Plus WordPress plugin is now international. The update integrates i18n (internationalization – eighteen letters between i and n) capabilities (including german translations for in this update, spanish planned next). If you want to contribute to the plugin by helping with translating it go grab the latest pot file from the Github  repository, translate it and post it in the plugin’s support forum. This way your translation will most likely ship with the next update.

Furthermore the plugin now ships with additions to WordPress‘ contextual help (this small help button on the top right of every admin page), revamped error handling and experimental, really experimental LiveLeak Support. They have no API at all and therefore it is quite a hassle to grab information from their video sites. So this is no reliable feature at all!

Go get the update at the WordPress.org plugin repository.

– video source: vimeo.com/33978304