Featured Video Plugin/Widget

Featured Video automatically features the latest video you include in a post in your sidebar.

Current Version: 1.2 (January 15, 2008)

Download: Download Featured Video Here

Wordpress Compatibility: Tested on 2.3.1, probably won’t work on less than 2.3 

History:
This was a plugin that I looked and looked for when I was putting a new blog together for my Brother-in-law. He wanted to start vlogging, but he wanted to have a youtube video display in the sidebar that he didn’t have to change manually, instead he wanted it to change when he made a new post to the video category.

Well, as you can guess, I found a TON of “Easy Youtube” Post/Gallery plugins and the like, but nothing even came close to pulling a video out of a post and featuring it in the sidebar. And thus, Featured Video was born.

I based the code on Paul Bain’s EasyTube plugin, (Thanks Paul!) but modified it heavily to include the functionality I needed in addition to the easy youtube/google video posting that EasyTube provided. And then I widgetized it for added usability.

Installation Instructions:
Upload the featuredvideo.php file to your /wp-content/plugins folder, then log into your admin account, and go to the Plugins page and click “Activate” in the Featured Video row

Usage:
First, go to Options > Featured Video and set your options. You can choose the height and width of the control, whether or not you want it to autorun (not recommended, because it’s really annoying when it’s on every one of your pages), and the text for the link back to the post the video is from.

If you don’t want to display a link, you can simply leave the link box blank and it won’t display a link

To use Featured Video as a plugin:
Put <?php vsf_show_video() ?> in your theme’s sidebar file

To use Featured Video as a widget:
Point and click, baby. You can also set the title text if you want to

CSS Considerations:
The entire chunk of HTML generated by the Featured Video plugin is surrounded by <div class=”featuredvideo”>…<div> so it’s pretty easy to manipulate in CSS.

For example, if you wanted a bigger margin between the video and the link, and you wanted the link centered, try this:

.featuredvideo object {
        margin-bottom: 5px;
}

.featuredvideo .link {
        text-align: center;
}

(Since all designs are different, I can’t support the CSS on your site. If the above CSS doesn’t work for you, keep trying!)

Nuts and Bolts:
Just like Paul’s plugin, Featured Video will also parse all posts for the following syntax:

[youtube:url] and [googlevideo:url]

So, if you wanted to post a youtube video in your posts, you could use a line like this:

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0md6Flcrd0s]

or Google Video:

[googlevideo:http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6204903272262158881]

If you use a [youtube or [googlevideo tag in any post, Featured Video will convert it to the required code for it to be displayed right there in the post. If you use one of those tags in a category that you’ve set in the Options page for Featured Video, it will display the first video from the most recent post wherever you put the <?php vsf_show_video() ?>  code.

Happy blogging!

Known Bugs:
When you delete the latest post in one of the categories you have Featured Video set up to use, the plugin knows about it, but fires its’ update code before the post delete actually happens. Workaround: Simply go to the Options > Featured Video page and click the Update button and it will pick up the correct video.

Any ideas on how I can get around that without coding a whole extra function for the delete? This case wont happen very often, so an entire function seems a little overkill.