wp-youtube-lyte

WordPress, Youtube (Lyte) and the GDPR

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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)
Watch this video on YouTube.

 

Long overdue: WP YouTube Lyte update

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It took me way too long (Autoptimize and related stuff is great fun, but it is eating a lot of time), but I just pushed out an update to my first ever plugin; WP YouTube Lyte. From the changelog:

So there you have it; Lite YouTube Embeds 2018 style and an example Lyte embed of a 1930’s style Blue Monday …

Orkestra Obsolete play Blue Monday using 1930s instruments - BBC Arts
Watch this video on YouTube.

Of bugs, inconsistencies and tag soup in (future) core

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In general i rarely bother looking into WordPress core code or what’s on the horizon. The last month or so however I came across 3 problems that were due to core.
1. Shortly after pushing Autoptimize 2.3.x out, a subset of users started complaining about a flood of “cachebuster”-requests bringing their site to a crawl. It turned out all of them were using Redis or Memcached and that due to a longstanding bug in WordPress core Autoptimize did not get the correct version-string from the database, triggering the update-procedure over and over, purging and then preloading the cache. A workaround -involving a transient featuring my wife and daughter- was introduced to prevent this, but “oh my gawd” what an ugly old WordPress core bug that is! Can someone please get this fixed?
2. A couple of users of WP YouTube Lyte noticed their browsers complaining about unbalanced tags in the Lyte HTML output (which is part of the_content). It took me a lot of time to come to the conclusion that WordPress core’s wpautop was messing things up severely due to the noscript and meta-tags in Lyte’s output. As wpautop has no filters or actions to alter the way it works, I ended up disabling wpautop when lyte’s were found in the_content.
3. My last encounter was with the ghost of WordPress Yet-to-come; Gutenberg … To allow WP YouTube Lyte to turn Gutenberg embedded YouTube’s into Lyte’s, it turned out I had to dive into the tag soup that Gutenberg adds as HTML-comments to the_content. I have yet to find documented functions to extract the information the smart way, so regexes to the rescue. But any plugin that hooks into the_content better be aware that Gutenberg (as part of WordPress 5.0) will potentially mess things up severely.
Although I cursed and sighed and I am now complaining, I felt great relief when having fixed/ worked around these issues. But working in the context of a large and successful open source software project and depending on it’s quality can sometimes almost be a pain as much as it is a joy. Almost … 😉

Forcing Featured Video Plus to display Lyte YouTubes

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A couple of days ago a WP YouTube Lyte user asked me if Featured Video Plus and WP YouTube Lyte were compatible. It took me a day to find the answer (I first said “no”), but Featured Video Plus actually has a filter (get_the_post_video_filter) that allows one to override the code used to display the featured video. And after a bit of trial and error this is what I came up with;

add_filter('get_the_post_video_filter','lyte_featured_video');
function lyte_featured_video($in) {
	$post_id = ( null === $post_id ) ? get_the_ID() : $post_id;
	$meta = get_post_meta( $post_id, '_fvp_video', true );
  	if (($meta["provider"]==="youtube") && (function_exists('lyte_parse'))) {
		return lyte_parse($meta["full"]);
	}
 	return $in;
}

Some extra checks ($post_id should not be empty, $meta should not be empty) would make this more reliable, but that’s something you should be able to add, no?

Warning WordPress plugin users about their old PHP

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After my initial disbelief about the amount of WordPress installations still on the slow and vulnerable PHP 5.2.17 (or older), I decided to warn users of my plugin with an non-dismissable warning on the plugin’s settings-page (and only there, so it’s not a default WordPress admin notice) cluttering the entire backend):
php52_warning_aoThis is going in AO 2.0.2 (out later today) and will in the future also be added to WP YouTube Lyte and WP DoNotTrack (both of which have a smaller reach).
If you’re a plugin or theme developer and want to warn your users as well (without blocking them), here’s the code I used (do change the translation-domain from “autoptimize” into one that is applicable to your plugin):

<?php if (version_compare(PHP_VERSION, '5.3.0') < 0) { ?>
    <div class="notice-error notice">
        <?php _e('<strong>You are using a very old version of PHP</strong> (5.2.x or older) which has <a href="http://blog.futtta.be/2016/03/15/why-would-you-still-be-on-php-5-2/" target="_blank"> serious security and performance issues</a>. Please ask your hoster to provide you with an upgrade path to 5.6 or 7.0','autoptimize'); ?>
    </div>
<?php } ?>

Crunching 2015’s numbers

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So this was 2015 in numbers:

  1. blog;
  2. OptimizingMattersAvatarMy WordPress plugins:
    • wp-youtube-lyte: pushed out 3 minor and 1 major release, getting 40264 downloads pushing the total to 250545 and having +10000 active installs
    • wp-donottrack: no releases for this one (except for some small readme.txt changes),
      downloaded 2355 times bringing the total to 14364 and +2000 active installs.
    • autoptimize: 2 minor and 1 major release, downloaded 265299 times this year, bringing the total to 506930 and +100000 active installs

That was 2015. For 2016 my main goal is to work on Optimizing Matters.
 

WP YouTube Lyte: new player UI and API tips

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WP YouTube Lyte 1.6.4 was released a couple of hours ago and features the new YouTube player look and feel:

Vieux Farka Touré & Julia Easterlin - Little Things (Music Video)
Watch this video on YouTube.

Here are some tips on how you can tweak that to match your own preferences;
As you can see in the vid above (Vieux Farka Touré & Julia Easterlin – Little Things), I wanted WP YouTube Lyte to show the bottom control (which as on YouTube is now invisible by default) add can be accomplished with just a little CSS:
.ctrl{display:block !important;}</code>

If you’d like Lyte to use the exact same font as YouTube does, you can add CSS to import that font and it will be applied to title-field in Lyte:

@import url(https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Roboto&subset=latin,latin-ext);

You can even use Lyte’s API do alter the CSS like this;

add_filter('lyte_css','lyte_change_css',10,1);
function lyte_change_css($lyte_css) {
        // source the font
        $lyte_css="@import url(https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Roboto&subset=latin,latin-ext);".$lyte_css;
        // show bottom control
        $lyte_css.=" .ctrl{display:block !important;}";
        return $lyte_css;
}

Talking about the API, you can now also force Lyte to be active on mobile as well (which is not the default as it would force your visitors to click “play” twice, once to load the YouTube iFrame and once to play as mobile YouTube doesn’t support autoplay), you can use this code;

add_filter('lyte_do_mobile','lyte_on_mobile',10,0);
function lyte_on_mobile(){
        return true;
}

3 interesting WordPress plugins

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I came across some interesting WordPress plugins and thought I’d document these quickly;

  1. Warm Cache; have your site crawled based on your sitemap.xml to re-generate your cache (applicable to both your page cache and Autoptimize’s cache)
  2. Duplicator: export your entire WordPress installation to an archive and install elsewhere. Haven’t tried this yet, but might come in very handy at some point.
  3. Code Snippets: don’t burden your theme’s functions.php with your own code (risking losing the changes with a theme update), but use Code Snippets instead. Handy if you want to e.g. tell Autoptimize not to be active on specific pages or if you want WP YouTube Lyte to also act on youtube-links in text widgets for example.