I put together a short screencast in order to illustrate the problems that can arise as one adds functionality (customizes) their WordPress install, and WordPress builds that same functionality into its new versions (standardizes).

Click on the screenshot below to view or download the video. It’s 720p HD (1280×720 pixels), so your computer may not be able to play it if it’s an older machine.

The video plugins were all the rage in years past. People (me included) wanted to be able to post videos in their posts, and customizing, or adding that feature via a plugin was the only way to do it. The plugin I chose to use was WPVideo, and posted virtually all of my videos using its particular format, which involved pasting the video URL between <video> tags.

Meanwhile, WordPress built that functionality into its 2.5 release, but it used the method made popular by the WordPress Video Plugin, where one simply indicates the name of video service (youtube, google, etc.) and the video ID between square brackets, like this: [example 123sampleid456]. I got my facts wrong, I’m sorry. WordPress built that functionality into its WordPress.com site, but it’s still not available in the WordPress.org (self-install) releases of WP. Sorry about that!

What this means for me is that I need to convert all of my posts where I used videos, to the new format, manually. While the WPVideo plugin still works with WP 2.5, it may or may not work at a later time, and I’m not sure how much longer its author is willing to maintain it. I’d rather use the method that is now built into WordPress as standard, so a LOT of work awaits me.

The screencast illustrates all of this, and drives home the point that once you have a library of content, you must curate it — keep it up to date — and sometimes it involves doing rote work like this. It’s no fun, but it’s got to get done.

Updated 5/8/08: Discovered a shortcut which allowed me to fix the video tags in less than 10 minutes instead of having to spend several hours doing it manually. I used the Search & Replace plugin for WordPress to search for strings within my posts and replace them. For example:

• For YouTube, replace:

"[video]http://youtube.com/watch?v=” with “-leftbracket-youtube ” and “[/video]” with “-rightbracket-”

• For Google Video, replace:

"[video]http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=” with “-leftbracket-google ” and “[/video]” with “-rightbracket-”

*Make sure to replace -leftbracket- with [ and -rightbracket- with ] if you decide to use the code above. I couldn’t use the real code because it was inadvertently interpreted as code and WP attempted to display non-existent videos.

It turns out that WP 2.5 still doesn’t have the built-in capability to play videos. I don’t know what made me think it, I’m sorry! It makes my main point moot, but fortunately it still remains relevant in view of the future. Therefore, I wasn’t able to do away with both the WPVideo and WordPress Video Plugins. I was, however, able to eliminate the WPVideo plugin and consolidate all of my videos to the WordPress Video Plugin using the method described above.

Hooray for the Search & Replace plugin!

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