EmbedPress 2.3.1 is available today and provides new Gutenberg blocks for Wistia.com and Twitch.tv.
Wistia is a very cool video marketing service. Twitch is Amazon’s incredibly popular -live streaming service.
Many thanks to all of you who use EmbedPress to embed media in your WordPress sites.
In this blog post, I’ll share an update on the future of EmbedPress, plus news about EmbedPress version 2.3.0.
Twitch is a live streaming video platform and part of Amazon.
Twitch is best known for streams of video games, but in recent years it branched out into other topics too. Browse around Twitch and you’ll find music videos and people live-streaming their lives.
Twitch is incredibly popular, with around 2 million broadcasters and 100 million viewers each month.
It’s no secret that we’re huge fans of Wistia here at EmbedPress. We use them for all our videos.
However, video is a large and often slow type of media. A site with lots of videos will often be a slow site.
Wistia are working on that problem by making their video player smaller and smaller. They’ve just released the second version of their Vulcan player. They claim some signifcant speed improvements:
A smaller player (plus the tons of optimizations Luke mentions in the video) means your pages load faster—10% faster, in fact. That’s right: We’re seeing pages with Vulcan V2 load 10% faster on average than those with our previous player.
Recently a user reported that EmbedPress wasn’t working correctly if they used the W3 Total Cache and enabled some of it’s most aggressive features.
They wanted to embed Google Sheets in WordPress, but the CSS wasn’t loading correctly.
W3 Total Cache is a good and popular plugin that will speed up your site. However, it does also have a habit of breaking other plugins.
WordPress offers you lots of opportunities to customize your blog design. Including customizing styles for your menus.
In this blog post, you will learn how to customize your WordPress menu with your own CSS style without touching your theme CSS file.
We’re huge fans of Wistia. They call themselves “your friendly neighborhood video platform”, and they do a good job of living up to that claim. Wistia is really easy-to-use, and a fun place to host your videos.
Talking of easy, the latest version of EmbedPress is the easiest solution if you want to use Wistia with WordPress.
All you need to do is grab the URL of your Wistia video and drop it into WordPress. The URL will automatically be transformed into a working video embed. More detailed Wistia instructions are here.
Automattic has just released a Google Chrome add-on that allows you to write posts in Google Docs and send them to your WordPress sites.
Why Google Docs? Matt Mullenweg had this to say:
[Google Docs] is probably the best collaborative document editor on the planet right now … We’re going to look into some collaborative features [for WordPress], but Google’s annotations, comments, and real-time co-editing are years ahead there.
We really curious about this announcement. First, it sounds like a really cool tool for WordPress users. Second, over the last few months, we’ve been building the EmbedPress plugin, which allows you add content to WordPress just using the URL of Google Docs, Sheets, Maps and more.
We’ve released EmbedPress 1.6 this week.
Whereas version 1.5 contained support for Giphy and Twitch embeds, this week’s release was largely focused on bug-fixes:
EmbedPress 1.5 has been released, and includes several improvements, including support for Giphy and Twitch embeds
This new version also has code enhancements, bug fixes and a branded settings page.
