There are a few things that have been the realm of premium themes and some rare free themes: post thumbnails, and easy video embedding(that doesn’t suck). Press75 just released two simple yet powerful and incredibly useful plugins: Simple Post Thumbnails and Simple Video Encoder. Go check them out, and let Jason know how awesome they are.
Simple Post Thumbnails
Easily add thumbnail capability to your theme. Previously most people used timthumb, but Simple Post Thumbnails is a bit cleaner. The killer feature is the ability to upload from a URL to your own server.
With the Simple Post Thumbnails plugin, adding thumbnail images to your posts is as easy as uploading any image (no editing required) and clicking the Update Post button. Upon upload, the plugin will re-size and crop the selected image according to whatever parameters you specify within the plugin configuration. To view this process in action, check out the Simple Post Thumbnails screencast.
Simple Video Encoder
There are a few video embed plugins for WordPress, but I don’t like most of them, they are heavy weighted and often add unnecessary headaches for theme developers and users. The Simple Video Encoder is a simple and effective way to add video embedding to your theme.
With the Simple Video Embedder plugin, adding video to your post is as easy as pasting the URL for the video you want to add within a field, and then click submit. You can even provide simple width and height parameters to size your video to match your theme. Currently, this URL embed method works perfectly with several services including Vimeo.com, YouTube.com, MetaCafe.com, Revver.com, Google Video and Seesmic.com. Or, of you want to host your own video, the plugin is also compatible with FLV (Flash Video) and Quicktime formats.
4 Comments
Leave a CommentI’ve used Viper’s Video QuickTags, which is relatively painless and works great. And it doesn’t require any theme modification.
I guess the idea behind this plugin, though, is to associate a video with a post, much like the thumbnail image. If so, then not being able to post multiple videos isn’t really an issue.
2nd Apr 2009
I personally can’t stand Viper’s Video QuickTags, it adds more files and code into your pages that don’t need to be there. But it is an easy to use plugin without the need to modify a theme.
I much prefer the simple approach of these plugins.
2nd Apr 2009
I used in on Pencil Nub quite a bit.
As for code, the only things I see in a post that has a video is some Javascript in the header and the post body.
It looks like it includes some stuff even when it doesn’t have to, but other than that I don’t see much extra code.
You tweeted about speed, but I don’t notice any problems.
2nd Apr 2009
I checked the demo site from the video to see how his plugin worked. It actually writes the object and embed tags into the post, which is nice as it doesn’t require any additional code.
I’d be happy to paste that code into WP to display a video but the rich-text editor (at least is used to) has issues with that. I did that with some videos on Pencil Nub since they weren’t supported by Viper’s plugin. I just had to use the plain text editor.
What are some of the video plugins you like?
2nd Apr 2009