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.

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.

If you’re a coder and are interested in the direction I am going with the next version of my popular Viper’s Video Quicktags plugin, I have committed what I have so far to the WordPress.org plugin SVN repository.

Please note that this is not production ready code. It’s still a proof of concept at this point basically where I am just writing ugly code in an effort to get the functionality there so I can test it. Large portions of it aren’t even coded yet (FLV support for example).

I’m only sharing it for anyone who builds on top of my plugin or whatnot with their own code. Everyone else shouldn’t bother looking at it. 🙂

Do you use Flowplayer on your website and have any additional configuration parameters? If so, can you please leave a comment on this post saying in what way you have customized the player (autoplay, etc. etc.).

I’m currently recoding my Video Quicktags plugin to use Flowplayer and I need to know what configuration options I need to allow the user to specify. I’m new to the player, so I don’t want to leave anything out that a lot of users will want to use. (I already have support for the commercial version on my todo list.)

Thanks!