New WordPress Plugin – YouTube Embed

Finally, my new WordPress plugin is released.

YouTube Embed does a simple job – it displays a YouTube video directly in your posts and pages.

Now, there are lots of similar plugins available but they’re either over engineered or, in some case, under engineered with missing features and no updates for years. Indeed, frustrated with some shortcomings with the plugin that I was using, it spurred me to write this one.

You’ll notice it isn’t one of my “Simple” plugins – this is because it includes options screen and various other “advanced” plugin features. It’s the first time I’ve written an options screen before. And a widget. And indeed, many of the features in this plugin, so be gentle with me!

Features include the ability to use both short codes but also to call a PHP function (for the coders our there!). You can embed both videos and playlists. You can also display video thumbnails and even fetch short YouTube URLs (recently introduced by YouTube). There’s even a widget for adding a video or playlist to your sidebar. And, naturally, the generated code is all XHTML compliant (unlike the code that YouTube provide you with!).

Download from WordPress or visit the official page on this site.

As always, let me know what you think, and feel free to send me ideas and suggestions for future enhancements.

Quick Tip!

I was using WP YouTube before – this means all my video short codes were set to [wp_youtube]. My new one, although compatible with many other plugins, uses [youtube] as a short code. Rather than edit all the posts, I simply added the following to my functions.php file within my theme folder…

add_shortcode('wp_youtube','youtube_video_sc');

You need to disable the original plugin and activate mine. This code simply gets any instances of [wp_youtube] to point to my new function.

wp_youtube, in the above code, can be replaced with any other short code.