Objective Bias

Wow! I was so happy to find out today that won first place in the Mura Plugin ColdFusion Throwdown! My entry was my Embed Video Plugin. I have to say, that I was sort of surprised and humbled, especially since my little plugin was pitted against such a great list of other plugins that were submitted.

Here were the judge's comments on my plugin from the ColdFusion Throwdown site:

"Pros: Supports multiple, popular video sites. Easily embed videos without knowing the HTML behind the embed. Cons: Strange issue with embedding on the Mura test site that placed the video centered - but that put it under the right-side navigation. Source did not indicate a reason why. Usability: Very easy to use. Lowest common denominator attributes such as width, height are likely good for many people. Usefulness: Great out of the gate. Still headroom for implementing additional attributes (see Youtube JS player API such as onstatechange(), etc.) would make for killer functionality and interoperability with site-wide JS scripts. Creativity / originality: Points for including four popular video sites as opposed to one single site. General functionality of embedding video easily is not original, but great idea to combine multiple sites. Overall: Good idea, good execution, good documentation. Look forward to seeing additional attribute support.

Not particularly original but very useful and easy to use. I didn't give the full 25 points for usability since documentation for using this within a component was not given. Overall this plugin is one that I would keep installed on all of my shared Mura servers."

I'm really curious about the "strange issue" that was encountered on their test site. I'll have to look into that. Overall, I think the comments are justified and fair. The idea, admittedly, wasn't very original, but I'm glad they agreed with me on the usefulness of the plugin. I do plan on adding features to future versions. For example, a user pointed out to me that there are parameters you can add to the YouTube embed code to prevent the "related videos" thumbnails to appear at the end and I'll be adding that as a tag attribute in the plugin.

I'd really like to thank Steve Good for running the contest. I think the whole concept of ColdFusion Throwdown is an excellent one and will only serve to strengthen our community and promote the development of great software. Also thanks to Blue River Interactive and Webapper for sponsoring the contest and for my prizes -- a 2 server enterprise SeeFusion license and an Amazon gift card! Of course, thanks to Blue River for Mura CMS! Also, congrats to Megan Garrison, whose Google Translation Widget plugin won 1st runner-up in the contest. Lastly, I really hope this helps my chances of the CFUnited committee selecting the talk I submitted on developing Mura plugins ;-)