Able Player version 4.7.0 beta 1 is now ready for testing – and your feedback is welcome! There are quite a few bug fixes in this release, a fair amount of code polish, and a new base design.

New Base Design

The base design is not visually significantly different; the goal wasn’t to make radical changes in appearance. However, it incorporates a lot of changes with specific goals in mind:

  1. Modernization: Removes all uses of float for positioning and modernizes to use flexbox layouts.
  2. Modernization: Use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) variables to define colors for easier customization.
  3. Responsive improvements: Automatically adjusts button sizes and floating window positions in narrow viewports.
  4. Fewer position and style declarations in the JavaScript code: This makes it easier to control characteristics with CSS.
  5. Update the design of modals.

Feature Updates

There are a couple of major new features. The most significant is the addition of support for synchronized sign language where both videos are coming from YouTube. Until version 4.6, you could only do synchronized sign language if both videos were hosted locally. In 4.6, I added support for local sign language with a YouTube hosted main video; and with 4.7, you can now host both videos on YouTube.

Other Changes

There are many, many minor changes in this release. You can check out the Able Player changelog to get more information.

How do I test?

The release contains all relevant files. But the key things that are actually needed are the build files; translations directory and, if you’re using the un-minified files, the styles directory.

If you check out the Github repository, you can run the demos in a local server environment to test a wide variety of different cases.

The current Able Player for WordPress repository has these changes incorporated as well, and you can download the beta of the plugin for easy testing in WordPress.