Tag Archives: Media Library

“Movies” plugin now supports WebM

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I just checked in version 0.3 of “Movies,” my HTML5 Video plugin for WordPress. When used with Shuffle, you can now associate an Ogg Theora file, a WebM file, and an image with an MP4 (H.264) file to load into an HTML5 Video player (built on top of VideoJS) that will play native Video in browsers that support it (most of them that aren’t IE, and IE9) and use the MP4 and Flash for browsers that don’t (old versions of good browsers and all versions of IE, minus IE9).

I spent half of the day trying to install ffmpeg on the command line to encode videos into WebM, but I failed miserably/then realized you can encode WebM files with Firefogg, the same tool that is used to encode Ogg Theora files: just select “vp8” instead of “theora” in the video codec dropdown. Easy!

Go here to see what’s supported where: http://diveintohtml5.org/video.html#what-works

My previous post on Movies: http://scotty-t.com/2010/11/24/new-plugin-movies/

New Plugin, “Tumble”

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I launched Shuffle 2 days ago, and it is has already been downloaded over 200 times. Drunk with this knowledge, I cranked out a 2nd plugin: “Tumble.”

Tumble is an API helper for, you guessed it, Tumblr. What does that mean? Well, your WordPress Media Library and Post history are great resources. They are content repositories waiting to be unleashed unto the world. By default, you share them using your WordPress blog/website, but why not use the same content on other services when appropriate?

Let’s say you want to start a Tumblr but you don’t want to take the time to fill it up with new posts. Maybe you want your website to have galleries of images, but there’s one photo in particular that you think would be great as a Tumblr “Photo” post. Tumblr might be a niche audience that likes your content, but only in bite-sized pieces. This is where Tumble comes in.

Tumble inserts it self in your Post history as a one-click action, right alongside “Edit,” “Quick Edit,” and the like. Click “Post to Tumblr” for a post in your list of Posts, and voila! you have added a new post to your Tumblog.

In your Media Library, I have added a column that inserts Tumblr Post links for each item. Click the link for an item, and the plugin is smart enough to know what time of content you are dealing with and will format the API call to Tumblr appropriately. Currently this works for Photos, Audio, and Video. There is a 10MB limit for photos/audio and a 50MB limit for video. The plugin will tell you right away if the item is too big to transfer.

I like the idea that your Media Library is just a content repository, so why not use it to share to other destinations on the web. Just another reason that WordPress is the Swiss Army knife of development frameworks!

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

My First Plugin: “Shuffle”

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I have been developing with WordPress for over a year now. It is hard to describe how much it has positively affected my development workflow. It’s easy to install, has easy-to-use APIs and great documentation, and its CMS capabilities are amazing. On top of that, it has a peer-less Plugin architecture which allows anyone to get under the hood and add functionality on top of WordPress core. The WordPress Plugin community is so vast and talented that when functionality is missing from WordPress itself, you are usually only one plugin away from tackling any problem you have.

  • I don’t want to write code that smushes my images, don’t need to: WP-Smush.it did it for me!
  • I don’t want to write a caching mechanism for my site, don’t need to: W3 Total Cache did it for me!
  • How do I write a sitemap and get myself up in the Google? No clue, so I’ll use Google XML Sitemaps!
  • I want to jam a social network into my website, oh heeeeyyyyyy BuddyPress!

But in the midst of this, I started building sites that have a lot of Images, Image Galleries, Video, Audio, Video Playlists, Audio Playlists, HTML5 video players, etc. WordPress is great at doing a few things with media:

1. Uploading multiple files at once
2. Hooks into the Upload actions (WP-Smush.it FTW!)
3. Attaching items to a post
4. Retrieving an item’s attachments (sorta)
5. Navigating through the Media Library… um, not really

Well, here’s what I NEEDED to do:

1. Detach images from a Post without DELETING THEM
2. Re-order my attachments by post (changing the order of a Playlist, etc)
3. Ordering my attachments by something other than date uploaded or title
4. Attach images to a video (another attachment) to use as a preview thumbnail
5. Attach album covers to audio files
6. Re-order a photo gallery at will
7. Do all of the above in an EASY way

WordPress doesn’t do any of this (if it does, it is hidden functionality that I don’t know about). So I decided to do something I, personally, have never done: I wrote a WordPress Plugin. Shuffle is the name of that plugin. Shuffle allows you to do a lot of thing with your Media that are not default WordPress behavior/functionality.

In the way that “tags” and “categories” are really just “taxonomies,” an “image” or a “video” is really just a Post type. Attachments live in the wp_posts table just like Posts, Pages, Custom Post Types, and other types of Attachments.

The wp_posts table has a bunch of fields. However, when it comes to attachments, there are 2 that we are really interested in: post_parent and menu_order. The act of attaching an image is really just setting the post_parent on the image to whatever number corresponds to the attaching Post type’s ID. If you attach 30 images to a post called “Hello World!” and Hello World’s ID in the database is 187, all 30 of those images will have post_parent set to 187. So if you want to “detach” the image, all you really need to do is set its post_parent to 0 (zero). Seems easy enough? Yet this is not an option in the Media Library.

If you create a Page and then create child Pages of that same Page, you will notice an attribute you can set by hand in the Edit panel: “order.” This corresponds to the menu_order field in the wp_posts table of the database. When you upload Attachments, menu_order is set to a default of 0 (zero) with no option to even change it by hand. Even if you could change it by hand, doing so for 50 images would be very very tedious. Wouldn’t it be great if you could see all 50 of those images for the attaching post and then re-order the images using a cool Drag and Drop UI that will set menu_order for you? You would think something that does at least half of this would be in WordPress by default, it is not.

I just uploaded a Video and want to feature it on a Page. I am going to use a slick new HTML5 Video Player and my Player wants me to specify a preview image / a “poster” image. I don’t necessarily have to do this, but I’d like to select the still show that shows on the screen before the user plays the video. I also want to set a thumbnail for the video so I can show a bunch of videos in a list or set up a cool HTML5 Video playlist. So how do I attach an Image to a Video in WordPress? You can’t.

This is where Shuffle comes in. Shuffle can do all of these things. Attach anything to anything. Detach without losing your files. Order your attachments by dragging and dropping like other services allow you to do. In your item’s list of Attachments, click on an item to see its Attachments! On so on and so on. Anyways, you need Shuffle! See it in action by downloading here:

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