yrnxt.com

Featured Video Plus 2.0.0 (2.0.1, 2.0.2, 2.0.3)

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.

FVP 1.9: Spanish

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!

AngularJS ngxSouffleur (unobtrusive typeahead) directive

I am currently developing a single page application using the awesome AngularJS framework. And because code sharing is still a trend, I will take my turn on it as well. The video above basically shows the complete functionality: Highly unobtrusive typeahead suggestions for input fields. A prompter (German: souffleur) in an opera house gives the singers the opening words of each phrase a few seconds early (wiki).

With every entered letter the directive looks if there exist suggestions in an array. If so, the first match is being displayed. When the user presses the tab key the suggestion is accepted and a custom event is fired.

The directive creates a new ngxSouffleur HTML tag which takes a couple of attributes: src (array containing possible suggestions), ng-model (will contain the input’s value), event (function to fire when the suggestion is accepted), child-class (class for the two child elements, if you are using bootstrap this might be ‚form-control‘) and finally input-id if you make use of html input labels somewhere.

The HTML for this is pretty basic. A relative positioned div containing two absolute positioned elements: The input the user types into and another div which contains the suggestion and is located right behind the input using absolute positioning.

<div>
  <div>{{souffleur}}</div>
  <input type="text" ng-model="model">
</div>

Below the directives complete JS code. JS and CSS are available on GitHub.

WPWeekly Episode 122

Sarah and Jeffro over at wptavern.com are talking about WordPress 3.7 and my recently completed Code Revisions Google Summer of Code project. For the Code Revisions part start listening at around 11 minutes in. Jeffro is struggling quite a bit pronouncing my last name.. Well, german umlauts!

Code Revisions 1.0 and GSoC interview

I updated the code revisions plugin to version 1.0 and have been featured on the WordPress tavern with an interview about this years GSoC.

The last GSoC week is on!

Code Revisions 0.8

My Google Summer of Code project at WordPress, Code Revisions, finally is available in the WordPress.org plugin repository. It is not final yet, but close to. The whole development process was and still is accompanied by weekly posts on make/core. Features and bugs are kept track of on the WordPress gsoc trac. If you find a bug don’t hesitate to report it there.

Go get it: http://wordpress.org/plugins/code-revisions/