Able Player 4.8.0 is now available! All the details about what’s changed in this release are available in my previous post: the Release Candidate announcement and call for translators. This is an exciting release for a few reasons: but most importantly, it’s my first steps towards removing the jQuery dependency.

jQuery is deeply built into Able Player, so removing that is going to take time – but reducing the dependency so it only requires the slim build of Able Player is still a big change.

It’s also exciting because it does remove the dependency on JS Cookie. Cookies are now optional for managing user preferences; by default, they’re managed in localStorage.

In the WordPress plugin, there’s now a new option to allow you to disable cookies.

Translations

On the translations front, the only translation I managed to get updated for this release was the German version, translated by Sabine Jordan. There were several people interested, but no other translations actually completed.

This is in part, I think, because there’s no user-friendly mechanism to manage translations – right now, they’re just a JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) object that requires updating in the Github repository. That means you have to be familiar with Github and JSON, which limits things a bit!

I’d like to improve that, so one of my goals in advance of version 4.9 will be to build a system to make it easier to translate the package.

WordPress Plugin Goals

The next major update for the WordPress plugin won’t be tied to the next Able Player release; it’s going to be focused on building out some enhancements to the plugin. I want to add support for people to build playlists and some other enhanced options for handling video, like being able to associate captions and poster images with your media in the media library.