Three weeks have past since the first release of Plupload. The amount of feedback and contributions to this project have been amazing. So we send a big thanks to all the developers who have contributed code and send us ideas and bug reports.

This new release includes many of these patches such as better chunking support for BrowserPlus and a new HTML4 runtime. We have also added multipart upload support and more easily understandable buttons for the jQuery queue widget.

So download the new 1.1 package and check the changelog for details on what we changed and please send in any feedback and continue forking the project on GitHub.

When developing Plupload we really enjoyed working with Google Gears, the whole quality of that project was just very nice from a developer perspective. Unfortunately, Google decided to stop developing Gears, possibly since HTML5 is getting a lot of the functionality, we believe it was way to early to close down Google Gears. Currently, the latest version of Google Gears does not work with Firefox 3.6 and it does not seem to be any light at the end of that tunnel, the latest post on the developer blog was at the end of May 2009.

BrowserPlus however is just full of life, the Yahoo employed developers are full at work producing quality code, after looking at the Plupload feature list, that red cross over the support for chunking really annoyed them so they have now released support for chunking and contributed a patch on Github. Spocke is currently looking it over and we expect to have that into the main code base very soon, and a new public version after that.

That means that BrowserPlus will support all functionality in Plupload, and since Google Gears doesn’t even work in the latest version of Firefox, will be the only runtime that does support all options.

Would also like to thank the ppl contributing other things for Plupload on Github and the general feedback we have received.

We have gotten a few questions regarding the supported features of Plupload and what they mean exactly.

Chunking

Chunking is smart, it will allow you to upload files regardless of how large they are. Normally server environments have a limitation how much they can store in memory, normal upload forms put everything in memory and dumps it down when the whole file is received.  With chunking, you can continue to upload even if the memory has a low limit cause the file is chunked into smaller parts and saved every x kilobytes.

PNG and JPEG resizing

Support for resizing means that images can be resized by the client, before they are uploaded to the server, saving a lot of bandwidth. Lets say you are uploading your vacation photos, instead of uploading a 2560×1600 image it will be resized down to a more web-suitable 640×480 image, saving a lot of space and making the upload quicker. Also this will use the client browser to resize the image and not the server resources.

Type Filtering

By type filtering we simply mean the option to select only a certain type of files, such as only .jpg etc.

Drag & Drop

This feature has been limited to Java Applets for so long now, but support for Drag & Drop is starting to look better in more of these supported ways to upload and we will continue to monitor their progress.

Fallback

A good approach when setting up Plupload is to configure your runtimes as optimal as possible, we would recommend the following order of fallback.

• Google Gears (best feature support)
• Silverlight (good support)
• Browserplus (good support)
• Flash (good support, best client spread)
• html5 (bad support, bad client spread)

Once html5 becomes more spread and usable, we would suggest putting it on top.

Why Flash so far down? Well actually after Google Gears (our personal favorite) the other plugins all have their faults and are rather similar. If chunking is required for you, remove HTML5 and Browserplus from the runtimes since they do not have support for chunking.

There are a few more options/features but they are quite simple and you should be able to figure them out if you check the documentation.

On another note, we will be making an update sometime soon with better buttons for uploading, a lot of ppl seemed to have missed the little “Play/Upload” icon on the right side of the UI and clicked the grey form send button instead.

If you want to contribute, be sure to visit the project on GitHub.

Using Plupload you can upload multiple files using Google Gears, Silverlight, Flash, BrowserPlus or HTML5. Flexible configuration allows you to choose all or only some of these upload “runtimes” with fallback in the order you specify. The license is GPL for you to enjoy.

There are a few really interesting features available, such as:

• Drag  & drop.
• Client side image resizing before upload.
• Select file type filtering.
• Chunking to allow uploading huge files without any problems.

Want to try it out?

Check out the website.

Note that some features only work with some runtimes and browsers, check the feature list on the Plupload website for more information. Also note that this is a first release version and may contain some bugs.

And if you are interested in the source, you can fork the project on GitHub.

Enjoy!

The new 3.3 release of TinyMCE comes with a new and improved table plugin. This new version enables you to select table cells and columns and perform table operations on them. The table selection is not limited to only table operations, you can also apply text formatting to the cells just like any other selection.

This is a complete rewrite of the previous plugin to reduce it’s size and improve it’s functionality. Table cell selection is possible in Gecko based browsers but we wanted to provide this feature to all browsers so it uses a special trick where it adds an internal class called “mceSelected” to each table cell in the selection. This enables you to override the look and feel of the selection to match your editors CSS.

There is still more things that could be added to the table plugin if you have interesting ideas for features or any other feedback feel free to drop us a message.