My Regenerate Thumbnails WordPress plugin has passed 10 million downloads, with over 1 million active installs! I never believed a little plugin I’d write in my free time and release for free would ever get so popular!
I’m officially discontinuing my Viper’s Video Quicktags WordPress plugin. It was one of the first plugins I ever wrote over 10 years ago. Back then embedding videos into WordPress posts was a chore and so I wrote the plugin to make the life of authors much easier.
Since then a lot has changed, namely the inclusion of native support in WordPress for even easier embeds, a feature that I actually contributed myself to WordPress.
Unfortunately users of my Video Quicktags plugin have been forced to keep the plugin activated so that embeds in old posts continue to work. Without the plugin, the shortcodes that the plugin created would cease working. So recently I wrote and released a tiny replacement plugin that creates those same shortcodes but has the native WordPress embed functionality handle the actual embedding of content.
If you are a Viper’s Video Quicktags plugin user, then I strongly recommend that you install my new plugin and then delete Viper’s Video Quicktags.
Besides switching away from a plugin I no longer support, advantages of the replacement plugin are modern, HTML5 embeds instead of Adobe Flash as well as automatic width to fit most themes, rather than fixed width independent of what theme you’re using.
It should be noted that the new plugin does not include the YouTube, Vimeo, etc. buttons in the editor but those are redundant due to how easy it is to embed videos directly from WordPress now — just paste the video’s URL on its own line.
Feel free to leave any questions or comments below.
If you use my popular SyntaxHighlighter Evolved WordPress plugin, please upgrade immediately. Ben Bidner discovered a security issue with the JavaScript highlighting library that my plugin uses. A couple of my Automattic co-workers and I worked with the author of that library to resolve the issue and the latest version of my plugin, 3.1.10, includes the fix.
If you use my SyntaxHighlighter Evolved WordPress plugin, please update ASAP. There’s a security issue with the Flash file that is used by version 2 of the highlighting library. This file is meant to be used for allowing one-click copying of the code to your clipboard (since normal copy/paste doesn’t work with it) but the file reportedly suffers from a cross-site scripting security issue.
Even if you use the better version 3 of the library (the default for my plugin), the file from version 2 of the library will still be included in the plugin’s files.
As a temporary fix, I have emptied out the file. This unfortunately means your visitors will not easily be able to copy any code you paste. I recommend switching to the superior version 3 via my plugin’s settings page. Code highlighted using the newer version can be selected and copied normally.
Feel free to leave any questions you have about this security issue on this post but please leave other general SyntaxHighlighter comments on the plugin’s homepage. Thanks.
Pippin Williamson has written a good explanation of which to use over on Wptuts+.
TL;DR: If the functionality is something that should continue to work after you switch themes, then it belongs in a plugin.
My most popular WordPress plugin, Viper’s Video Quicktags, has passed the 1 million download mark!
I really should give it more love and attention…
With the release of Jetpack 1.5, Jetpack now supports the awesome carousel feature that you may have seen running on WordPress.com. It’s superior to my jQuery Lightbox For Native Galleries plugin in my opinion so I am opting to discontinue development on my plugin.
My plugin should continue to work for the indefinite future but I will no longer be maintaining it.
JW FLV Player has been removed from the latest version of my Viper’s Video Quicktags plugin. The player is not compatible with the GPL license and as a result cannot be included in plugins that are hosted in the WordPress.org plugin repository. I shouldn’t have added the player to my plugin in the first place but it was the only decent player at the time oh so many years ago. Today I have rectified that mistake by removing it from my plugin’s download.
However do not fear — I have not actually removed the functionality, I just no longer bundle it with my plugin. If you wish to continue to use the player to embed .flv and .mp4 files after upgrading to version 6.4.0 of my plugin, you will need to download this ZIP file and extract it to your wp-content folder, resulting in /wp-content/jw-flv-player/player.swf. I’m hosting the ZIP file since my plugin uses an old version of the player that is no longer available for download from the official site.
This is a temporary band-aid fix. The eventual plan is to switch to the GPL-licensed Flowplayer but that won’t happen until I complete the latest recode of my plugin which introduces many much-needed features. Whether I’ll actually ever finish version 7.0 of my plugin is another matter though.
If you have any questions or need any help, please post over on the Viper’s Video Quicktags page.
Someone has been trying to brute-force attack my site lately (guessing my username and password) and so I thought I’d share the plugin that is blocking them and also letting me know that it’s happening: Limit Login Attempts. After a configurable number of log in failures, the plugin blocks the IP from attempting to log in for a configurable amount of time. Super handy. 🙂
I’m having trouble coming up with a good name for my latest WordPress plugin so I thought I’d crowd source it. 🙂
My other WordPress-powered site, FinalGear.com, receives very large traffic spikes. I used to just run WP Super Cache to prevent the site from going down but Apache would still actually die under the load even though it was just serving static content. Since the site has no comments or other often changing content, the easiest solution at the time was just to throw a reverse proxy called Varnish in front it with a decent cache time (5-10 minutes per page). I’ve since switched from Apache to nginx which solves that issue but it’s still easiest to just leave Varnish there.
Varnish is set up to ignore cookies on the front end of the site. That means I get served the exact same version of the site that you (a guest) sees — no admin bar, no post edit links, and so forth. Getting to the admin area is easy thanks to an absolutely positioned hidden link in the bottom left of the site (hover over it, you’ll find it) so lack of an admin bar is no problem for me.
What is a problem though is the lack of easy way to edit a post. I currently have to go into the admin area and then browse to the post in order to edit it. So I wrote a plugin that outputs the edit post link even for people who aren’t logged in. However the link is hidden using CSS and then re-shown using Javascript only if you have a logged in cookie.
It works perfect but what to call it? My working title was “Javascript Edit Links” but that seems so bland and locks me a bit into a corner. What if I someday want to add other features to the plugin, such as even showing the full admin bar? Do you have any better ideas?