Audio Redux + Updated Plugins

I had the pleasure recently of realizing that some of my plugins had disappeared from the WordPress dot org plugins repo because I haven’t updated them in 1.5ish years. Last year at WordCamp San Francisco, I used part of my talk to explain why plugins aren’t always awesome, and me not updating my own plugins is a great example of why. You might think to yourself, “Scott’s pretty good, I’m sure his plugins are awesome, I could probably get pregnant just by activating one of them!” To which I would reply: “If you are using my Movies plugin, I have absolutely no idea if it still works, and I’m sure every javascript library in it is 50-75 versions behind.”

So I am trying to right this wrong and update my code. Back in 2010, I was still under the impression that procedural programming was da bomb. Needless to say, the plugins should work a lot better now and will be maintained / are more maintainable.

Here are some of the plugins that are updated, along with their companion blog posts:

Minify
Plugin: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/minify/
Blog Post: http://scotty-t.com/2012/05/24/minify-redux/

Shuffle
Plugin: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/shuffle/
Blog Post: http://scotty-t.com/2010/11/15/my-first-plugin-shuffle/

Audio
Plugin: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/audio/
Blog Post: http://scotty-t.com/2010/11/22/new-plugin-audio/

Audio is awesome, and here’s why:

  • WordPress doesn’t come packaged with an mp3 player
  • Your player can be styled 100% with CSS – (drop in a replacement: STYLESHEETPATH . ‘/audio.css’)
  • If you use Shuffle, you can attach .ogg files to your .mp3s, and they will be used in native HTML5 browsers that don’t natively support .mp3
  • If you use your own styles, you can style a playlist automatically, and with Shuffle, attach image(s) to each MP3

BOOM. I will try to be a better man in the future and keep my plugins bleeding edge.

xoxo

“Audio” plugin now supports Ogg Vorbis

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/audio/

I just checked in version 0.2 of my HTML5 Audio plugin for WordPress, “Audio.” When used with Shuffle, you can now associate an Ogg Vorbis file and/or image with an MP3 file which will all load automatically and simply into an HTML5 Audio player on browsers that support it with a fallback to Flash for those browsers that don’t.

Support for Ogg is crucial because Firefox will not play MP3s natively. Unless you view the source of your code or are the developer of your site, none of this information should matter to you – you can continue to use MP3s, and the code will load HTML5 Audio/Flash behind the scenes. For those who want to take advantage of the latest/greatest and shun Flash whenever possible, use Ogg and MP3.

More on “Audio” here.