On my tale of switching media player plugins, D’Arcy’s comment about troubles with the Anarchy Media Player preview got my thinking, why be stuck with the lame graphic the plugin provides? Just make your own, and replace the vid-play.gif file inside /wp-content/plugins/anarachy-media/images — here is a test to see how mone looks- this is the […]

Note to readers- mostly tedious details on WordPress nuts and bolts to follow- click next for the usual shallow barking and whining)

WordPress Plugins are awefully powerful to let you easily add/subtract functionality form your own hosted WP site. But sometimes, they become a marriage that may be difficult to extricate yourself. For the NMC Campus Observer, our WP powered site for our Second Life antics, since its inception on March 2006, I had used PodPress, a rather full featured plugin to handle the embedding of audio, sometimes video.

It has a huge list of features, and if you have ever looked, adds a lot os “stuff” to your pages. It has a lot of updates, and each replacement is a not so moderate upload of scads of files. Adding the audio/video content is not done via editing your content, but via a separate editing pane. But more problematic, I’ve had numerous incidences where the site’s display was mangled on certain browsers– sometimes Safari lost a sidebar, more recently the site was totally wrecked in Internet Explorer, the sidebar pushed down to the bottom, bottom of the post/comments field cut off. If I disabled PodPress, the display issues went away. But then also, did all of my links to the media. And one of the recent WordPress updates seemed to have a conflict with PP as well.

So its been on my list for a while to get myself out of this relationship. I have been using Anarchy Media Plugin on other sites which is one with less overhead, no mucking of display (well I did discover the Gregarious plugin has a conflict that disables Anarchy), but better it works simply by replacing a simple hypertext link to your mp3, .mov, etc with a player icon. This way, should you ever move to another plugin, your content is in tact.

If you are looking for a simple plugin to just convert mp3 links to a nice small player, I like Taragana’s Del.icio.us mp3 Player WordPress Plugin.

So the task was I’d have to find every post that had a PodPress managed media, and rewrite the post to have a normal href link that Anarchy could pick up.