Use Google Libraries

About Use Google Libraries

The Use Google Libraries plugin allows your WordPress site to use the content distribution network of Google's AJAX Library API, resulting in potential performance benefits such as cached files, reduced server load, and compressed versions of libraries. It supports several libraries and components and is compatible with most plugins and themes, although there may be some incompatibilities. The plugin also has future plans to add more features and customization options.

Frequently asked questions

What is the purpose of this plugin?

This plugin allows your WordPress site to use the content distribution network side of Google's AJAX Library API, rather than serving these files from your WordPress install directly.

What are the potential performance benefits of using this plugin?

The potential performance benefits include: increases the chance that a user already has these files cached, takes load off your server, uses compressed versions of the libraries (where available), and Google's servers are set up to negotiate HTTP compression with the requesting browser.

Which libraries and components are supported by this plugin?

The supported libraries and components include: Dojo, jQuery, jQuery UI, MooTools, Prototype, script.aculo.us, and swfobject.

Are there any incompatible plugins?

Yes, the Better WordPress Minify, Gravity Forms, and WP-Minify plugins are reported to be incompatible with this plugin.

Are there any incompatible themes?

Yes, the K2 theme has been reported to be incompatible with this plugin.

Changelog

1.6.2.3

Updated supported version.
used archive.org to get around link that’s now malware

1.6.2.1

Bypass functionality when running under 4.2+ until next version to avoid breaking sites.

1.6.2

added some missing jQuery UI modules (hopefully fixes issues from support
forums I couldn’t reproduce previously).

1.6.1

same as 1.6 (due to SVN issue with 1.6)

1.6

Drop support for PHP4, and WordPress < 3.4
clean up PHP 5.x strict issues

1.5.2

using protocol-relative URLS with WordPress >= 3.5
use WordPress provided is_ssl rather than custom check (only for
WordPress < 3.5)
Detect if ‘jquery’ is a meta-script registration, and actual jQuery
is loaded as ‘jquery-core’ tag (WordPress 3.6 Beta).

1.5.1

fix bug in is_ssl check.

1.5

using wp_remote_head to query that the replacement URL is actually
hosted by google. If it’s not, then the WordPress supplied version will be
used.
Using the Transient API to store the replacement URLS, rather than
recalculating and re-querying them every load.

1.2.1

Added check for WordPress including non-standard versions of scripts (fixes
WordPress 3.2.2/swfobject).
Fixed incorrect case in HTTPS check.

1.2

Reworked handling for cases where multiple js files are combined
into one on Google’s servers. In the past this has been mostly a
non-issue because the dependencies took care of it, but due to changes
in the latest jQuery UI this stopped working as expected.

1.1.2

Updated jQuery UI to work with WordPress 3.1rc1

1.1.0.1

Re-disable script concatenation. Seemed to break widget admin page.

1.1

No longer disable script concatenation when using WordPress 3.0 or
greater
Attempt to detect when another plugin or theme has called
‘wp_register_script’ and/or ‘wp_enque_script’ before ‘init’ and work
around it.
Limited debugging output when WP_DEBUG is enabled.

1.0.9.2

Hopefully fix issue with plugin loading for some users

1.0.9.1

Added Incompatible Plugins and Incompatible Themes sections
to the README

1.0.9

more https detection
inline jQuery.noConflict()

1.0.7.1

fix previous fix (whoops!)

1.0.7

Quick and dirty workaround for scriptaculous loading (thanks to
Gregory Lam for bringing it to my
attention

1.0.6.1

moved location of the Changelog section in the README

1.0.6

Disables script concatenation in WordPress 2.8, since it seems to have
issues when some of the dependencies are outside of the concatenation.
Persists flag to load scripts in the footer in WordPress 2.8

1.0.5

Implemented a pair of
suggestions
from Peter Wilson.

It should detect when a page is loaded over https and load the libraries over https accordingly
It no longer drops the micro version number from the url. The reasons for this are twofold:
- It ensures the version requested is the version received.
- Google’s servers set the expires header for 12 months for these
  urls, as opposed to 1 hour. This allows clients to cache the file
  for up to a year without needing to retrieve it again from Google’s
  servers. If the version requested by your WordPress install
  changes, so will the URL so there’s no worry that you’ll keep
  loading an old version.