The VideoWrangler project is my work on the old VideoPress plugins by Charles Iliya Krempeaux as well as the vPIP plugin by Enric Teller in order to make the plugins compatible with the newest versions of WordPress and to reduce script size at plugin runtime.
The VideoWrangler plugins and complete documentation can be found on the VideoWrangler documentation page here.
The two blogs that I used as the basis for the plugin updates are http://www.ryanishungry.com and http://www.mikemoon.net. Their problem? When upgrading to the newest version of WordPress the plugins which drove their site quit working, yielded errors, or stopped the entire page from loading. Tracing through the plugin code I narrowed the problems down to two main sources: WordPress’ database structure had changed and the large amount of information contained on these blogs was exceeding the maximum allowed php script size on their servers.
With problems pinpointed, VideoPress was on its way to working once again within a few hours by updating references in the VideoPress code to entries in the WordPress database. The script size issue lead me back to vPIP to create a leaner function used to fetch chunks of data from the database. The original way VideoPress would gather vPIP data was for vPIP to supply VideoPress with a list of every single video entry that existed on the blog. While that works fine for small numbers, Ryanne and Mike’s blogs had years of back video catalog that made calling all of that data at once an enormous waste of space and resources. To scale back demand on the server I created a new function within vPIP that was only used to recall chunks of archive video data to be displayed on each archive page or to be displayed in the recent videos reel. This way the function would only return a set number of entries (which is specified in the plugin’s preference) as opposed to retrieving all of the site’s entries.
The updated version of the VideoPress project has been renamed as VideoWrangler to signal a fork from the original set of plugins and a change in project management. Updates to the VideoWrangler plugins will begin in November (time allowing) and will address the functionality requests from the video blogging community. The most up-to-date version of the plugins will always be available for download as a complete package or separately on the VideoWrangler documentation page.