Rating: 4 stars
It is great to see the Ooyala team putting some effort into refactoring this plugin to be more user-friendly, and with the release of 2.0.1 it maintains backward-compatibility with the 1.x strain of settings and functionality. The codebase is much more elegant overall, the video browser uses the media chooser, and settings are now found in the Media area of WordPress. Overall, it feels more well-integrated to WordPress itself, and less like an after-market add-on. Here’s hoping it continues to be well-maintained!
[Original review was: “Version 2.0 Breaks Backwards Compatibility”]
]]>Rating: 1 star
This plugin is disappointing and has not improved in more than 5 years. Part (maybe most) of the problem may be more due to the way Ooyala works rather than the plugin itself, so I’m happy to at least award it one star. The features the plugin attempts to provide are great and I appreciate the effort by the developer who did the WordPress integration, but Ooyala’s service itself is sub-par.
Ooyala clearly does not care about front-end performance or how their embedded video cripples page load render speed. The script that loads the HTML5 video blocks the rendering of the rest of the page.
I tried updating from v1.6.1 and all hell broke loose. Video not loading, fitVids incompatibilities, WP admin UI elements breaking, dogs and cats living together, etc. Not only did I have to revert to v1.6.1 but I also had to restore the site’s database to an earlier version.
Ooyala also isn’t aware of responsive design and sets fixed dimensions on inline style attributes with gay abandon. This creates a great deal of work for developers to integrate the video with modern websites.
]]>Rating: 1 star
Ooyala’s API went down and the genius that wrote this plugin didn’t handle its exceptions. Tah-dah, my site is now down until Ooyala’s API goes back up again. Idiocy, sheer idiocy.
Avoid.
]]>Rating: 1 star
This plugin while doing the basic functionality, doesn’t have any error catching on its API interactions (which happen on every admin page load). Meaning, if the Ooyala API goes down for any reason, so does the backend of any sites in which this is installed.
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