FLV Embed Modification

I love Yaosan Yeo’s FLV Embed WordPress plugin. In fact, while here on TnH I use a variety of plugins, on my new site it’s exclusively FLV Embed.

Now, the plugin ships with an old version of JWPlayer that doesn’t support subtitles. This is bad because that’s just the feature I needed. So, I updated the player version shipped with the plugin and also added a few more tricks to the otherwise great plugin:

  • You can now specify a default size in the options. If you don’t give a size in the flv tag, it’ll automatically use the ones specified as default.
  • There’s a few more parameter combinations, most notably you can now add subtitles to the parameter list (filename, sub, poster, width, height).

What does this mean? You now have the following possible combinations:

  • (filename) Plays just the filename with the default size, no subs or poster
  • (filename, subs) Plays the filename with the specified subtitles with the default size
  • (filename, subs, poster) Same as above, just with the additional poster
  • (filename, subs, width, height) Same as above but without poster and with custom sizes
  • (filename, subs, poster, width, height) Same as above but with poster.

Yeah, I don’t really need the poster. If you’re interested you can grab the file here. Be advised that you need to download and unpack the player.swf and yt.swf from the new JWplayer to make this work. Also, you need the original plugin.

WordPress 2.7

Gee, there I am, not updating my installation for ages and now I’m wandering the path of nightly-builds again.

WordPress 2.7 is amazing. The new interface not only looks great but also offers a lot: You can collapse your toolbar to save space, the auto-updater has been improved and now supports updating WordPress’ core as well.

Quite slick, can’t wait for the final 🙂 .

Fixing the “null” date problem in WordPress

If you’ve been a constant reader of my blog (and of course I know you are 😉 ) you could hardly have missed the ugly “0” date in the archives. Turns out that this 0 date was caused by all the old drafts I had saved but never published. Deleting the drafts would help, but simply assigning them a date seemed like a more sane solution. Voila, problem solved.

K2 Hooks

One of the major annoyances with theme upgrades is that all your precious changes will be lost, or you’ll have to diff and patch it from one version to another. That’s quite a lot of useless work.

The K2 theme I’m using as the base for this WordPress installation supports two cool features now:

  • You can include your own stylesheets without changing one line of code.
  • You can access various hooks to modify the way K2 works without changing one line of code.

Personally I think that’s totally awesome. But there are some points I’m still missing, though. For starters, the hooks are currently quite rudimentary, I can’t really control every element at this point. Second, I want to add options to the admin panel through my style’s functions.php — which I am unable to do atm (if I’m wrong on this point, please enlighten me :)).

Nevertheless, K2 is absolutely awesome. Ah, and in case you wonder… yes, the theme is getting a makeover. I’m migrating from the old, broken (too much playing ;)) Unsleepable 2 to a new something I’m currently building.