DJ-WebP 0.7 Beta update with new compresion mechanism

In the last weeks, we have been working on the biggest issue in the DJ-WebP with generated web images that have a bigger size than the original. We have fixed it, and now we are finally ready to release a long-awaited 0.7 Beta version. 

In version 0.7 Beta, we have implemented an advanced PHP WebConverter library from GitHub.

In plugin configuration, there is now a possibility to select which mechanism should be used by DJ-WebP. We have 2 Compression mode options, the first option is named “System” and is the default DJ-WebP compression mode which was used in previous versions. The second option is “Library,” which uses a custom PHP mechanism for compression.

If we select Library mode, then the plugin will discover a new field named “Compression method.” The compression method specifies which custom function will be used for compression.

• cwebp - Execute cwebp binary using exec
• vips - Using PHP Vips Extension
• imagick - Using Imagick PHP extension
• gmagick - Using Gmagick PHP extension
• imagemagick - Execute imagemagick binary using exec
• graphicsmagick - Execute graphicsmagick binary using exec
• GD - Using PHP GD Extension

The default Compression method used by the Library is GD because the newest server should have it enabled.

Be careful when selecting the Compression Method because not all methods work on your server. Choosing an unsupported method will cause the plugin to throw an exception error.

Below is a comparison between the original and DJ-WebP compression modes.

The other issue that users are often reporting in support tickets is a problem with detecting .webp support on the server.

We have fixed conditions that check Firefox, Chrome, and Opera and implement Internet Explorer detection.

In the next release, we will be focused on solving the problem with images which has a problem with converting because of their names. At this moment we know that the problem is with

• UTF-8 characters like Cyrillic
• Spaces in names

The second problem is the user cannot delete .webp images that are not linked to the site. For example, if you generate an example .webp from example.jpg and then you remove example.jpg then the system will not delete .webp.

We are planning something like an image map that allows the user to easily manage all currently generated WebP images.