How to LYTE-n up your WooCommerce video’s

So you have a WooCommerce shop which uses YouTube video’s to showcase your products but those same video’s are slowing your site down as YouTube embeds typically do? WP YouTube Lyte can go a long way to fix that issue, replacing the “fat embedded YouTube player” with a LYTE alternative.
LYTE will automatically detect and replace YouTube links (oEmbeds) and iFrames in your content (blogposts, pages, product descriptions) but is not active on content that does not hook into WordPress’ the_content filter (e.g. category descriptions or short product descriptions). To have LYTE active on those as well, just hook the respective filters up with the lyte_parse-function and you’re good to go;

if (function_exists('lyte_parse')) {
add_filter('woocommerce_short_description','lyte_parse');
add_filter('category_description','lyte_parse');
}

And a LYTE video, in case you’re wondering, looks like this (in this case beautiful harmonies by David Crosby & Venice, filmed way back in 1999 on Dutch TV);

Venice & David Crosby - Guinnevere (Live on 2 Meter Sessions)

WordPress, Youtube (Lyte) and the GDPR

So you (vaguely) know about the GDPR I’m sure. German netizens seem ahead of the curve, as I’ve been mainly getting questions about Autoptimize and WP YouTube Lyte from that part of Europe. It even looks like the German implementation of the GDPR is pretty strict, with people removing externally hosted resources (like Google Fonts and Facebook widgets) from their sites.
It’s in that context that user ekatarinal on the WordPress support forum for WP YouTube Lyte asked if the thumnails for the Lyte video’s could not be loaded locally. That way user information (IP-address -and if the user is logged in to Google a lot more- would not be available to Google/ YouTube unless and until the visitor clicked the play-button. Additional advantage; no extra dns-lookup, http connection or ssl/ tls negotiation, no short caching-headers, … so very likely to improve performance as well!
And that’s why WP YouTube Lyte 1.7.0 is in the works and it will have that option. In fact it’s already up on Github in a first incarnation (call it beta), so if you want to test you can download the zip-file here.
EDIT: Lyte 1.7.0 was released on April 28th, no need to go down that Github road.

Wildbirds & Peacedrums "There Is No Light" (official video)

 

Chemical Brothers & Beck; no video, just “artwork”

The Chemical Brothers released an album earlier this year and there’s one track on there which I really love; “Wide Open”. It’s a pretty melancholic song, with vocals by Beck and it builds up to become a superb dance anthem really.
I liked it that much, that I wanted to upload it to YouTube for others to enjoy and based on this image I created a small animation in Gimp to accompany the music;
chemical brothers animation
I joined the mp3 with the animation in VirtualDub and uploaded the video to YouTube only to it immediately see it blacklisted due to copyright infringement. So you’ll have to look at above far-from-flawless animation while listening to the song on SoundCloud to enjoy the full experience I had in mind.

WP YouTube Lyte now parses normal YouTube links as well

I was just being a jealous guy, seeing how normal YouTube embeds (oEmbeds) got previewed nicely in WordPress 4.0 TinyMCE editor. This had been on my wishlist for a long time already and I looked into enabling that for httpv-links and lyte-shortcodes as well, but that turned out not to be that simple.
So I took the alternative approach, enabling WP YouTube Lyte to act on normal YouTube-links (a much requested feature anyhow) and thereby piggy-backing on the TinyMCE-improvement in 4.0. So there you have it; lyte video’s can be inserted using normal YouTube links and that will result in a (non-lyte) preview of the video in the visual editor content box.
1.5 as a number of other improvements and bugfixes, but you can read all about those in the changelog.
Have fun with this small Rick James like party-track to celebrate 1.5.0 (and my birthday, while we’re at it);

Mark Ronson - Uptown Funk (Official Video) ft. Bruno Mars

How to have normal YouTube-links handled by WP YouTube Lyte

Although by default WP YouTube Lyte only works with httpv or httpa links and hence does not act on normal YouTube links (which are instead auto-handled by oEmbed in WordPress core), you can easily change this behavior by adding the following code-snippet to your theme’s function.php or to a separate “helper”-plugin:

/** force wp youtube lyte on http://www.youtube.com url's as well */
add_filter('the_content', 'force_lyte_parse', 1);
function force_lyte_parse($content) {
     $content=str_replace('http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=','httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=',$content);
     return $content;
}

Now that wasn’t too hard, now was it?

Radiohead in het Sportpaleis: over oordopjes en oortjes

We waren er bij, vorige week donderdagavond in het Sportpaleis! Ik ben nochtans geen concertganger, maar ik wilde Radiohead toch één keer live gezien hebben en mijn super-Veerleken had alles perfect geregeld.

Hoe het was? Het was overdonderend. Het was te luid zonder en te dof mét oordopjes. De muziek-freak in mij luistert misschien liever naar één van de vele goeie live-opnames die op het internet te vinden zijn, maar het geluid van de bassen door het lijf was wel bijzonder intens. Het was strakker, juister dan wat ik op YouTube van hun optreden op Coachella gezien had (om van de try-out op Glastonburry nog maar te zwijgen). Wat een groep en wat een falsetto. Het was laat, we zijn na het immer sublieme Paranoïd Android moe maar verzadigd vertrokken om de drukte van de massale uittocht voor te zijn. Maar het was ook te kort; ze hebben zo veel goeie nummers niet gespeeld, “Jigsaw falling into Place” uit “In Rainbows”, “Little by Little” uit “Kings of Limbs” of nog recenter werk zoals “The Daily Mail“, “Staircase” of “Full Stop“. Maar wat ze wel speelden was dus wreed de moeite! Kijk en luister zelf maar:

Playlist: 20121018 - Radiohead @ Sportpaleis
Watch this playlist on YouTube

En zo zit ik 5 dagen na datum nog altijd met mijn hoofd in het Sportpaleis, met oortjes in plaats van oordopjes. Zo is de muziek-freak in mij ook content!

WP YouTube Lyte: what is in 1.1.0 for you

Nope, 1.0.0 wasn’t WP YouTube Lytes final destination, the train has left that station to arrive at version 1.1.0 yesterday. Main new features include:

I’ll leave it to Avi Buffalo to show you how the new UI looks like:


And I changed the short description (which features prominently on the wordpress.org plugin page) to better match main features:

High performance YouTube video, playlist and audio-only embeds which don’t slow down your blog and offer optimal accessibility.

Next stop: 1.2.0. Any feature requests?

WP YouTube Lyte 0.8.0 released

Just a quick note confirming the release of WP YouTube Lyte 0.8.0. As previously described, the main new feature is support for embedding YouTube playlists in a high-performance and accessible kind of way that is typical of this plugin.
While testing the new feature on different platforms I noticed the playlist-player only comes in Flash, so it does not work on iPads or iPhones. Or “does not work on them yet”, as YouTube’s Jeff Posnick confirmed that support for HTML5 video in the embedded playlist player is on their todo-list.
The plugin is multi-lingual, with the following languages supported:

  • English
  • Dutch
  • German
  • Slovenian
  • French (only the strings visible for visitors, not those in wp-admin)
  • Spanish (only those strings visible for visitors for now)

Corrections, extra translations, bug reports and feature requests are all welcome feedback, either in the comments here or via the contact page.
I hope you enjoy the new version!