I’m officially discontinuing my Viper’s Video Quicktags WordPress plugin. It was one of the first plugins I ever wrote over 10 years ago. Back then embedding videos into WordPress posts was a chore and so I wrote the plugin to make the life of authors much easier.

Since then a lot has changed, namely the inclusion of native support in WordPress for even easier embeds, a feature that I actually contributed myself to WordPress.

Unfortunately users of my Video Quicktags plugin have been forced to keep the plugin activated so that embeds in old posts continue to work. Without the plugin, the shortcodes that the plugin created would cease working. So recently I wrote and released a tiny replacement plugin that creates those same shortcodes but has the native WordPress embed functionality handle the actual embedding of content.

If you are a Viper’s Video Quicktags plugin user, then I strongly recommend that you install my new plugin and then delete Viper’s Video Quicktags.

Besides switching away from a plugin I no longer support, advantages of the replacement plugin are modern, HTML5 embeds instead of Adobe Flash as well as automatic width to fit most themes, rather than fixed width independent of what theme you’re using.

It should be noted that the new plugin does not include the YouTube, Vimeo, etc. buttons in the editor but those are redundant due to how easy it is to embed videos directly from WordPress now — just paste the video’s URL on its own line.

Feel free to leave any questions or comments below.