WordPress Plugin v4.3

I’ve been hard at work on my WordPress video plugin since I got back from editing Maron season 2 (premieres May 8 on IFC!) in LA a month ago. I finally tackled some things I had been putting off.

First and most important, I internationalized the plugin. When I first started cobbling this plugin together in late 2010 I had a very specific goal in mind, and that was to make it easier for me to post videos with thumbnails. I had a frequent need to show clients work-in-progress videos and I didn’t want to wait for Vimeo to transcode my perfectly good videos, so I used my existing WordPress plugin to share password-protected videos. It always annoyed me that I had to save a thumbnail file and upload it separately if I wanted to have an image show up in the video window so I thought I could save myself some time.

Of course it did not save me any time and since I’ve been working on productions with actual money lately I usually have an assistant who uploads videos to fancy services like DAX. So the plugin became a thing to improve just for the sake of improving it, which led to expanding its scope way beyond what I originally planned.

At this point the plugin has been downloaded over 164,000 times and we can assume that a number of those people are not native English speakers. Over the years I’ve seen those __( 'Some text' ) things in code examples but I never really understood what was going on with them. I had taken a look at the I18n for WordPress Developers page and it kind of baffled me. I had never used the sprintf function before and that seemed complicated. But it’s actually really simple, and when I finally sat down a couple weekends ago and went through the whole program to add those __() things, it wasn’t so much hard as it was incredibly tedious.

But now it’s done, and if you’re interested in translating the plugin, please let me know. I already have Spanish, French, and Danish volunteers.

The other important and actually more tedious issue was adapting the plugin to multisite installations. I had never used WordPress Multisite and I assumed it would just take a little adjustment to fix the problems users had alerted me to. It was not little, and I wish I had never started working on it. If the plugin is network activated, all the individual sites encoding queues are visible on a network encoding queue, and you can set the major FFMPEG settings on a network level. You’re welcome multisiters.

There are a whole bunch of other things, including a re-written gallery pop-up system and the option to use JW Player. Check out the changelog for the full list. And if you have any questions, please create an issue on Github.

2 replies
  1. Doug Wilson
    Doug Wilson says:

    This is a stupid question but, that said, “I think” I selected the “Encode Videos” button under the FFMPEG Settings. I think I did but I can’t tell because I was taken back to the home settings screen, but I noticed the red wheel whirling which suggests something is running. So, by the time you get this I’ll have done something else stupid like hit the button again or close the plugin screen.

    The point to the comment is, it’d be nice to know, maybe a message like “The videos are being encoded, don’t touch anything, don’t freak out and post something stupid on the authors page”. Maybe this could be a new feature request…

    Reply

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