WordPress Murdered My Plugin
Yeah, I know – the title sounds like I hate WordPress. But quite the contrary – I actually LOVE WordPress. But, they MURDERED my “baby” – plugin that is!
Ok, so my plugin that was not quite born – but it was in the third trimester. Or at least it felt like it.
Several months ago I started development of a plugin that I had affectionately been calling “Embeddeo”. It was the perfect name with the perfect premise – it was going to revolutionize (in my mind, anyway) the embedding of Video into WordPress Posts and Pages – and it would be not be a premium plugin, but a Free for all plugin. I thought long and hard about how it would work. I spent many hours of research on it to make it the best. And in the Eleventh Hour, WordPress beat me to the punch – they added a new method to embed video that eliminated many of the problems users had been facing. Damn.
Granted, my baby was going to have a live video preview on the admin edit screens – so the second you added the video code, you could see if it was the correct one or not. And my baby was going to be compatible with 10 or so of the most popular video embedding sources out there – YouTube, Revver, Vimeo and Hulu – just to name a few. And my baby was going to not only let you embed one video, but a entire users RSS Feed worth (where supported).
But when it came time for delivery, I found out the hard way – it wasn’t my child. It was WordPress’ child.
In the long run, I am quite glad they beat me to the punch – so to speak. It saves me time and money on support and further development. And like I always say, “If WordPress does it natively, why the heck do you need a plugin?”
At the end of the day, when the ‘kids’ are screaming, they can go home with their parents and I can get peace and quiet!
Thanks WordPress, and I really, truly do mean that!

Hah! Don, I hear ya!
When I heard about some of the features that were in WP 2.9, I was afraid WordPress was going to give my baby the boot too, that being a plugin called PhotoSmash. Since that first pang of fear, though, I’ve burned out. I can’t answer another 1,000 questions and put in another 100 feature requests…I just don’t have the time!
Please WordPress…Please build something that does what PhotoSmash does!!!! Please, d@mn you!
Cheers,
Byron