This week I published two new videos for you and some big news about the platform itself. Conveniently, one of the videos is about how I shipped a big platform change. :)
🎬 A brand new video player and streaming platform
Last weekend I finished one of the biggest under-the-hood changes in CraftQuest history. I migrated every video in the catalog (all 1,300) to a new streaming platform and a new player.
The old player wrapped Vimeo in an iframe, so every feature was dependent on the Vimeo player API. The new player is build on VidStack (open source player) and stream from the new video provider Mux.
You still get all of the player UX you expect: progress tracking, volume, CC, and speed consistency between plays. The player should also be snappier to use and load.
I'm slowly rolling out the new video player via a feature flag but it should be available to everyone within the next week.
Oh, and Claude Code helped me build a structured, repeatable process to migrate to Mux, and accellerated that work. What a massively impactful tool.
🚩 How I pulled off the rollout: feature flags!
Swapping the player on 1,300 videos, live, inproduction, with all of the paying, premium members watching? Oy. That's a risky change if you ship it all at once.
So, I didn't! In the new video linked below, I talked through how I used the Feature Flags plugin to decouple deploying the code from releasing the feature. I deployed it dark, turning it on for just myself in production, and then rolling it out gradually. I had a one-click option to turn off the new player and Mux streaming, and revert back to Vimeo-powered playback.
It's a real, high-stakes rollout on a production Craft CMS project with paying customers!
This second video is short one with a simple message. It's my small rah rah speech to you that you shouldn't let anyone tell you how to build, what to build, and when to build. If someone if telling you otherwise, then they might have ulterior motives.
You don't anyone an explanation or apology for how you built something. It's never been about the tools.
