This is a guest post by Chris Thomson.

Viddler has just put out a new beta release (1.1 beta 1) of their video commenting plugin. The new version really extends the functionality to do much more than just video commenting.

Dashboard Widget

The new version of Viddler video commenting now includes a WordPress dashboard widget. That means that on the front page of your WordPress dashboard, you can view the most recent featured videos from Viddler. The handiest part of this new feature, is that there’s a little “Blog This” link below each of the featured videos. If you click the “Blog This” link, you’ll be presented with the write post page, with the Viddler video already embedded.

Media Integration

Viddler has done an excellent job of making it easy to embed videos into your blog posts. Once the Viddler plugin is activated, simple click the “Add Media” button on your WordPress 2.5 write page. You’ll notice there’s a new tab called “Viddler Videos.” If you click on Viddler videos, you’ll notice you are presented with the Viddler featured videos, and four tabs at the top: “Your Videos”, “Search”, “Record”, and “Featured”.

The “Your Videos” tab asks you for your username, then displays your videos that you’ve uploaded to Viddler. The “Search” tab is similar, it asks you if you’d like to perform a tag search or a user search. Underneath all of the videos you’ll see an embed link, which will close the media overlay and embed the video into your post. And lastly, the “Record” tab will ask you to fully login to Viddler. Once you login, you’ll see a little flash recorder that will allow you to record yourself, just like the one on Viddler.com. One downside to the record feature is that it will always ask you for your login, and won’t save your Viddler login with your WordPress account.

Video Comments

Viddler has done video commenting the right way. If a user wants to comment on a post, all they have to do is click on “Record or choose a video?” and they’ll see a nice little overlay asking them to login to Viddler. If they don’t have an account, they can make one using that overlay, meaning the reader will never leave your blog! Anyway, once they have an account and are logged in, they can either record a video, or select a video they’ve uploaded to Viddler, as their comment.

Options

Some WordPress plugins out there will add all of their functionality to the front-end of your blog, and the only way to remove a certain piece of functionality would be to edit the plugin file, or disable the entire plugin. Thankfully, Viddler allows you to set if you’d like it to show the “Record or choose video?” text publicly. They also give you a few other options, too: comment player, post player, custom tags, button text, comment box id, and the ability to turn the dashboard widget off completely. Viddler has done a great job at allowing you to disable the features you don’t want in their plugin, which is something more WordPress plugin authors should allow you to do.

Colin Devroe, community evangelist at Viddler, has recorded a quick demonstration of the plugin features:

The Viddler video commenting plugin, which combines all of the great features above, is available at the Viddler Lab, but be warned, this is a beta release, which means it might be a bit buggy.