Earlier we discussed about Downloading YouTube Videos easily to your hard-drive. Now this tutorial explains you how you can easily display latest video thumbnail from a YouTube channel or playlist using a highly customizable widget in your WordPress based website.
Installation & Usage: Install and activate YouTube Channel plugin then visit Dashboard -> Appearance -> Sidebar and drag its widget to your sidebar or any custom widget area your theme provides you. After adding widget to sidebar first important thing you need to do is add YouTube Channel or if you wish to use a playlist instead of channel then set theplaylist ID.
Useful Features: Main purpose of the widget is to display latest video fromgiven YouTube Channel or Profile with a link to channel at the bottom of the widget but it provides you useful features and customization options:
- You can display latest video from YouTube channel or playlist
- Provides you option to get random video from given channel orplaylist
- Provides you an option to set custom widget title
- Allows you to set custom set of width and height of videothumbnail/embeded object (default 220 x 165 px)
- You can set preferred aspect ratio relative to width (custom, 4:3, 16:10 and 16:9)
- You can scoose display video thumbnail, iframe (HTML5 video), object embed (Flash video) or chromeless video
- You can fix height for old and new YouTube embed and Chromelessvideo object taken by controls
- Provides you option to enable autoplay video
- Provides you option to hide video controls
- Provides you option to hide video info
- Provides you option to display video title on top of the video
- Provides you option to display video description below vide (experimental)
- Provides you option to hide annotations from video
- Provides you option to use light controls theme
- You can set custom text for link to channel
- You have the option to show link to channel
- You have the option to open channel in new tab/window
- You have the option to use target=”_blank” instead of javascript window.open() for chanel link in new tab/window
Styling: Another good thing about this plugin is that you can use style.css from your WordPress theme for stylingYouTube Video widget content.
.youtube_channel -Widget wrapper class.ytc_link– class of container for link to channel.ytc_description– class for video description text.ytc_video_last– class of last container for single item.ytc_video_first– class of first container for single item.ytc_video_container– class of container for single item.ytc_video_mid– class of all other containers for single item.ytc_title– Class of video title abowe thumbnail/video object.ytc_video_1,.ytc_video_2, … – class of container for single item with ordering number of item in widget
How To Find YouTube PlayList ID ?
If you are planning to use this plugin for displaying videos from some playllist the you would be needing the playlist IDs. Finding YouTube Channel is easy because it is openly displayed but some users might face problem for gettingYouTube playlist IDs.
Its easy to get YouTube Playlist ID, all you need to do is copy it from the YouTube Playlist URL. It is a part of strings after&list= which begins with uppercase letters PL represent playlist ID. One can paste ID with or without leading PL string. For more FAQs refer to this link.