I’ve made changes to two of my WordPress plugins today…

Simple Draft List

Yes, I know I only changed this yesterday, but I’ve now made an improvement to the date ordering (otherwise scheduled posts would always appear at the top of the list, as they have a future date). Now it’s based on the last modification date, meaning that changing a draft will move it back to the top again.

YouTube Embed

I’ve added a  transparency option so that videos won’t cover up layers on your site. The original problem would only have affected some people, but it’s a worthwhile change (which I haven’t made switchable, but can do if there is a need to do so).

Thanks very much to Daniel at optincrusher for finding it, reporting it and even checking over my changes!

After some time off, plugin development has restarted.

Two plugins have been modified, and both are relatively small changes. YouTube Embed has had its demonstration video fixed and Simple PayPal Donate now validates with XHTML Strict. In  both cases (and for upcoming plugin changes) I’ve also added some commenting to the resulting XHTML so that it’s easy to find the code in the source.

More changes to come…

Finally, my new WordPress plugin is released.

YouTube Embed does a simple job – it displays a YouTube video directly in your posts and pages.

Now, there are lots of similar plugins available but they’re either over engineered or, in some case, under engineered with missing features and no updates for years. Indeed, frustrated with some shortcomings with the plugin that I was using, it spurred me to write this one.

You’ll notice it isn’t one of my “Simple” plugins – this is because it includes options screen and various other “advanced” plugin features. It’s the first time I’ve written an options screen before. And a widget. And indeed, many of the features in this plugin, so be gentle with me!

Features include the ability to use both short codes but also to call a PHP function (for the coders our there!). You can embed both videos and playlists. You can also display video thumbnails and even fetch short YouTube URLs (recently introduced by YouTube). There’s even a widget for adding a video or playlist to your sidebar. And, naturally, the generated code is all XHTML compliant (unlike the code that YouTube provide you with!).

Download from WordPress or visit the official page on this site.

As always, let me know what you think, and feel free to send me ideas and suggestions for future enhancements.

Quick Tip!

I was using WP YouTube before – this means all my video short codes were set to [wp_youtube]. My new one, although compatible with many other plugins, uses [youtube] as a short code. Rather than edit all the posts, I simply added the following to my functions.php file within my theme folder…

add_shortcode('wp_youtube','youtube_video_sc');

You need to disable the original plugin and activate mine. This code simply gets any instances of [wp_youtube] to point to my new function.

wp_youtube, in the above code, can be replaced with any other short code.