I wouldn’t trust a plugin that’s not being updated, or supported, or maintained.
If it’s not being actively updated or monitored you wont know if theres a vulnerability until it’s too late. You should take active steps to move away from said plugin and, if on a freelance basis, explain the issues to your client and have them pay for your time doing so.
This is an issue I’m having with personal sites I have. Are there any like the two I’ve mentioned that I won’t have to go through and redo the embed codes in each post for the Youtube plugin? I have ten sites with one having hundreds of posts I’d have to go through. As you can see, this is a pain in the butt to have to deal with.
Well, you might be risking your website being hacked. Maybe pay someone to security check it. There was a case a few years ago when a party brought a bunch of inactive plugins and pushed some malicious code to them.
Again, my suggestion would be to find a way to move away from this plugin.
So once more I’m going to ask, how do I replace the coding in the SmartYoutube plugin in at least ten sites with more than 100 posts each? If you’ve got a suggestion for that one, I’d love to hear it.
@nowordneeded You can hire a developer to programmatically move over the data from SmartYoutube to something different. You can do it manually by installing a compatible but separate and similar plugin and move things over one at a time.
I unfortunately do not have an end-all-be-all answer for you but wanted you to understand the risks of keeping outdated plugins installed.
What I say is this, plugin developers should be responsible for their plugins. Namely, they should either keep them up or not put them out to begin with. Like I said I have ten sites with over 100 posts each with embeds from Youtube in my posts. Things like videos and interviews and such. So because WordPress plugin developers lose interest in updating their plugins we webmasters are left with hackable sites…which is what has happened with me, and no fix for those plugins that will break a large part of many of my sites when being uninstalled. I say there should be a repository of those plugins where someone at WordPress keeps them up, or else don’t put them out in the first place. That’s a suggestion. Hiring a developer to move almost 1000 posts over to a new plugin that will itself likely be discontinued or abandoned is something I really look forward to…. only not. Either make these things inclusive to the core of WordPress or don’t put them out to begin with.
Either make these things inclusive to the core of WordPress or don’t put them out to begin with.
It is not possible for all functionality everyone could ever want to be in core. In your particular case, embedding Youtube videos is supported by WordPress core and does not require any plugin. Just paste the URL of the video into the editor.
If you’re using a free plugin that adds some extra functionality and want some updates to that plugin, I suggest contacting that developer to find out if they have a paid version or can be hired to make the updates for you.
If the plugin uses shortcodes, you (or a developer) can probably do a database search and replace to change all of them at once without taking very much time.
https://github.com/interconnectit/Search-Replace-DB
