Improvements in ARVE 9.0 and ARVE Pro 5.0

I try not to sound to needy with this but it I have been developing these plugins for 8 years and I really have trouble making enough money with the sales from the Pro Addon.

svn log -r 1:HEAD --limit 1 https://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/advanced-responsive-video-embedder/

r499755 | plugin-master | 2012-02-03 14:28:45 +0100 (Fr, 03. Feb 2012) | 1 Zeile

adding advanced-responsive-video-embedder by nico23

The reason partially because I do not do any marketing outside the settings page and wp.org page. If you can help me promote the plugin in any way. I think I go for another attempt to find a marketing person who works a few hours a week for me to bring more sales in.

I would appreciate donations (even symbolic ones would make me happy) and license subscriptions for the Pro Addon.

For a complete list of changes without much detail please see the changelog on wp.org. Some of these features were requested by users, some came “naturally” and were planned.

ARVE 9.0#

Minimum PHP requirement is now PHP 5.6#

Mainly for namespaces and because testing has become a drag you can no longer use outdated, slow and insecure PHP versions. WP itself requites this PHP version since May 7, 2019, WordPress 5.2. Be sure to pick a host that has the latest PHP ready for you as 5.6 is already End of Life meaning its insecure. At the time of writing the latest PHP version is 7.4. WP itself will require

Removed jQuery dependency#

It’s likely that you use a theme or plugins that require it but ARVE will not be the plugin that hold you up in dropping it. ARVE Pro has a new lightbox script to be able to drop jQuery.

Gutenberg Block#

Long overdue ARVE now has a Block for the new (hated) WordPress editor. Technically it’s not a “real” Block 100% written in JavaScript but a block with a server side PHP callback that feeds the all powerful ARVE embeds to the Block Editor. WP own embed Blocks like Embed, YouTube, Vimeo … work the same way but offer no extra options.

Embracing oEmbed#

ARVE now uses WP own oEmbed functionality and adds Twitch, Wistia and

Back in the day I was not very found of the idea behind oEmbed for “simple” iframe embeds (turns out they are more complicated to handle than I originally thought). Because they make an API call to the video hosting provider to get the embed code but the embed code can in 97% of cases be generated from the URL using regular expressions to get the ID of a video and then using that to build the URL needed for the iframe like …youtube.com/watch?v=EYAbKec6Sws. But it turns out in some cases maintaining this regular expressions can be annoying. For example, I recently found out that the plugin was not detecting YouTube live links correctly. But more importantly the oEmbed data actually contains the width and height values for a video and therefore the aspect ratio can be set correctly. To be honest the claim that ARVE auto-detects it is actually wrong for the older versions. This dates way back then embed players from some providers had their own control bars with various heights so the “detection” was just setting it correctly to 16:9 + correct control bar space and things like that for providers. This way it ended up in the feature list.

Long story short, oEmbed leads to correct aspect ratios for all providers that have oEmbed support. WP has also built in caching for oEmbed so this is what ARVE now uses to cache the entire blocks of HTML rather than using transients for custom oEmbed calls.

Aspect Ratio Detection from ANY iframe Embed Code with width and height#

When pasting ANY iframe embed code into the URL/Embed code field in the Gutenberg Bock or the Shortcode UI dialog if you are on Classic Editor ARVE will now extract width and height to fill in aspect ratio field in for you.

Settings Page Overhaul#

The WP Settings API is the most annoying and over-complicated API I ever worked with. But WordPress also has this newer REST API that I used to create a new minimal setting framework. Also looks nicer with some new modern CSS making it centered.

The ARVE Pro options are visible to free users before they install the Pro Add-on. There are two main reasons for this. It’s programmatically easier to have them all in one place and also it may be a nice incentive to win over some paying customers who see what they miss out on. Note there is no actual code in the main plugin for the Pro functionality it’s just the options.

ARVE Pro 5.0#

Dropped dependencies: jQuery, Lity Lightbox, Object-Fit Polyfill.

Double click workaround removed#

The entire workaround to prevent double click has been removed. Instead, the YouTube and Vimeo iFrame APIs are used to start playing videos that results in directly playing the videos after clicking a thumbnail or link for a way better experience. For other providers users have to tap another time because mobile browsers prevent loading a iFrame that autoplays videos. If this is a huge issue for you, I could implement a feature like switching to normal mode with native iFrame lazy loading to have something that works like the previous workaround just in a more modern way. But it will sacrifice custom thumbnails and titles on mobiles!

Fullscreen feature#

New awesome feature to make the page go fullscreen when a lightbox opens. Optionally stay fullscreen when the lightbox is closed. Will exit as soon as the user navigates to another page.

Auto pause, Auto reset, Auto exit Lightbox#

When a new video is played in the page while another is still playing it is auto paused or reset to its initial state depending on what is supported.

Only for YouTube, Vimeo and HTML5 Video. When a Lazyloaded video has ended its state will switch back the (custom) thumbnail/title hover effect state.

Only for YouTube, Vimeo and HTML5 Video. When the Video has reached its end the Lightbox is automatically closed.

One response to “Improvements in ARVE 9.0 and ARVE Pro 5.0”

  1. Liat Avatar
    Liat

    Hi, thank you for this update. Is the play button for YouTube videos supposed to be huge, like the size of the entire video? Thanks!

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