Anthony Mattox Interaction Design + Digital Art

WordPress Processing Embed is a wp plugin to embed Processing applets into WordPress posts and pages. The plugin lets you embed applets directly into the page, or, display in the page or in a new window, when alternate content is clicked.

If you have a WordPress site go try it out. Let me know if you find any problems or have suggestions. This first release does not yet include support for libraries.

Usage

To use the plugin, upload a .jar file through the media uploader and insert the shortcode [processing file="yourapplet.jar"]. A default width, height, and embed method can be set in the admin panel and they can be overridden with parameters. Alternate content can be placed in a closing shortcode. For the ‘newwindow’ and ‘onclick’ methods, alternate content will be displayed and wrapped in an anchor tag.

A more complex example: [processing file="yourapplet.jar" width="500" height="300" method="onclick"]Alternate Content[/processing]

When exporting your applet, ‘use multiple .jar files’ should be checked in the processing preferences. The plugin already includes the core.jar file.

Demo

Despite all the work I’ve been doing with Processing I don’t have many of the functional applets on the web. This is partly due to issues with embedding applets into WordPress posts. WordPress, the content management system I use for this site, is a great tool, but it has an unfortunate habit of screwing up code posted within the page content.

There are, of course, plugins to get around such issues, but I have a better plan. I’m building a WordPress plugin expressly for embedding Processing sketches. I’ve built a very basic version without any admin options. Inserting a simple shortcode into a post adds the applet. The shortcode is contained in brackets and simply reads ‘processing file=”path/to/file.jar” width=”450″ height=”250″‘. The .jar file can be uploaded with the media uploader within the “edit post” page in the WordPress admin or through the media library. The plugin includes the core.jar, so only the specific (and fairly small) .jar file for the applet needs to be uplaoded.

My basic script suits my own needs, but I’m working on an expanded version with an admin panel to set default options, alt text, and styles. I’m also not sure how this will render in RSS readers (probably not well but it should work in the site).

If you have any questions or suggestions on how I should move forward with this or features I should include leave a comment. The plugin should be available within the next few weeks.

see how it looks »