With over 334,000 downloads WP Smush.it has become a staple within many WordPress developer circles – it’s an incredible plugin that has helped thousands save space by optimizing images – lossless, by the way.
It stripped meta data from jpegs, optimized compression, converted certain gifs to indexed pngs, and even stripped un-used colors from indexed images.
Sadly though it seems that it’s time for the original author, Alex Dunae, to move on:
Unfortunately this plugin is no longer maintained, at least not by me. Growing family and work as well as shifting focus just don’t leave me the time.
(The plugin still works, though there is the occassional glitch.)
If anyone out there is interested in taking the plugin over, feel free to get in touch at [email protected]. The most obivious way forward is to add support for pngcrush, optipng, etc… on servers that support, and even look at what can be done within GD.
Somewhat related, to this day it’s not clear what Yahoo intends to do with their Smush.it system. Users of the plugin have always gotten unofficial permission to use the service, but there’s no way of knowing how long that will last (though it has been years).
I’d love to do be able to do more with WP Smush.it, but life conspires against it. It’s been fun smushing the hell out of those extra bytes with you all.
With that much attention and the incredible download rate it would be a great product and project for someone to take over and continue the great tradition of smushing bytes.
I hope someone picks it up – if I wasn’t so busy I might have done it myself but I know my own limits. Let us know if you take it over!
Thanks to @chriscct7 for the headsup.
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