Adopting an OSS-orphan: Autoptimize

I’m taking over support for the venerable Autoptimize WordPress plugin. Although I started out using CSS-JS-booster first, I switched to Autoptimize for my JS & CSS aggregating and minimizing pleasure somewhere in 2012, not in the least because it was the only plugin to offer conversion of background-images to data-uri’s. I hadn’t noticed back then that Autoptimize was already pretty old and that the developer announced he didn’t use WordPress any more and that he had lost most motivation. Fast-forward to December, when, while working on a Twenty Twelve child theme, I noticed that Autoptimize messed Twenty Twelve up severely. So I dug in, found some problems and fixed some others while I was at it:

  • leave html5.js be; aggregating it breaks HTML5-support in older IE versions
  • make sure the IE-specific CSS-files are loaded after the normal aggregated CSS
  • ensure both JPG and JPEG files are taken into account for conversion of background-images to data-uri’s
  • correct a bug that resulted in aggregated files not having a hash in them (having one or more autoptimize_.php can break things)
  • stop autoptimizing for logged in users (which broke the WordPress 3.5 admin bar again)

Based on feedback on the WordPress support forums, others were still using Autoptimize as well, needing bug-fixes and support so I contacted Turl a couple of days ago and proposed that I join his one-man team. He agreed, so I’ll be taking over Autoptimize as of now. The first update (1.4.1) with the fixes listed above will be pushed to SVN soon. I’ll provide support on the wordpress.org forums as well and release new bugfix-versions if needed. New features or other major updates however, are not on the roadmap (yet). I wouldn’t want my own children, WP YouTube Lyte and WP Donottrack, to feel neglected, now would I?