FeedTube
Ken April 11th, 2008
History
FeedTube began being developed when I noticed there wasn’t a very easy way for me to link/embed all of my YouTube videos. I began investigating some options, but most said you need to use the YouTube Developer API. I then noticed there was an RSS feed for my username and started looking around for ways to parse this XML feed easily. I saw you could do it using the PEAR module, but some servers don’t have that installed. I n then saw there were some great new XML functions in PHP 5, but again, not all servers are running PHP 5. So, I educated myself on using XML in PHP 4 and started getting a working plugin going. The result is FeedTube. It can take any RSS feed from YouTube and embed/link to the videos contained.
Installation
Just download the newest version of FeedTube from http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/feedtube/, unzip the file and upload it to your /wp-content/plugins/ directory. Activate it in your plugin settings in WordPress and you’re off and running.
Using FeedTube
FeedTube is currently only being developed for WordPress 2.5+, as it uses the new ShortCode API. To embed/display an RSS feed you only need to enter the [feedtube] token with a couple of parameters. These are (default in bold ):
- feed – any rss feed from YouTube (ex:http://www.youtube.com/rss/user/username/videos.rss)
- limit – 20 (20 is the maximum # of videos)
- style – player or noplayer (embed the first video in the feed)
- showtitle – y or n (show video title?)
- showdate – y or n (show date added to YouTube?)
- showuser – y or n (show user byline?)
A sample token may look like this:
[feedtube feed='http://www.youtube.com/rss/user/youtube/videos.rss' limit='5' style='noplayer' showuser='n']
And would be displayed like this:
A default token of:
[feedtube feed='http://www.youtube.com/rss/user/youtube/videos.rss']
Would be displayed like this:
Help
Questions, comments, bug reports and feature requests can be left here. I’ll do my best to get to them in a timely manner. Specific posts on FeedTube will be located here. Leave any questions here and I’ll try to get to them when I can. The widget is still in development. Thanks!
hi. Thanks for plugin
perfect.
Doesn’t work in php5. I get and error:
[function.fopen]: failed to open stream: HTTP request failed! in /home/anarchis/public_html/wp/wp-content/plugins/feedtube/feedtube.php on line 47
cannot open http://www.youtube.com/rss/tag/cars.rss
I tried all types of rss urls but get the same error.
This plugin does not work with tags as suggested on youtube site (http://www.youtube.com/rss/tag/monkey.rss). How do you use this plugin to show videos related to what ever keyword you want?
Mike,
I tried that feed and it worked fine. Could you try to use one of the “test feeds” listed above and tell me what happens. Could you also email me the phpinfo() for your server? Thanks,
Ken
[feedtube feed=’http://www.youtube.com/rss/user/youtube/videos.rss’]
where do i enter the above code?
Jason,
Just go ahead and put that in the regular “Write” box for a post or page and it should work if you have the plugin activated.
Hi… I have a question.
I want to insert the videos after comments. Can you tell me how to insert the php code?
Ken,
Thanks for developing this plugin. It is exactly what I was looking for. I entered your sample token in a static page and I get this error:
cannot open ’http://www.youtube.com/rss/user/youtube/videos.rss’
I have tried several feeds that I know work fine as tested in firefox. Please help.
Thanks.
-Mike
Top plug in if I only could get it to work… Video are not showing and where there should be a picture there is only a red cross. Have tried own rss feeds and examples given on this site, but with same result. Does it have something to do with permissions either with Youtube api or hosting? I am hosted at Hostgator. The plug in are active but for this reasons not in use on my site at the moment. I use another one, but would like to use yours.
Thank you!