Video Gallery Plugin for WordPress

I spent quite a while looking for a way to display a video gallery that allowed multiple video sources (not just YouTube) and that didn’t require me to host the videos myself. I tried one that I thought would do the trick - the VodPod Videos Widget. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get it to work well on my blog (their sidebar video widget works great though). The code was not flexible enough to allow me to position the gallery elements the way I wanted and it didn’t seem to work at all in Internet Explorer.

So, I wrote my own video gallery plugin, based on VodPod. VodPod is a great tool for collecting videos. You can download a browser toolbar so that all you have to do is click a button when you are viewing a video and it will insert it into your VodPod account, which will then allow it to appear in your WordPress gallery. So get yourself a VodPod account and then give this plugin a try.

Multiple video galleries within one WordPress site, as displayed on this site with the Second Gallery Example page, is now supported

Download: vodpod-video-gallery v0.6

To install:

  1. Copy the vodpod-video-gallery folder to your wordpress plugins directory.
  2. Activate the VodPod Video Gallery plugin from your admin plugins page.
  3. Go to the ‘VodPod Video Gallery’ page in the ‘Options’ menu and configure your VodPod account name.
  4. Put the text [ Insert Video Gallery ] into any page (without the spaces between the [ ]).
    Alternatively, for multiple pods on one wordpress site, you can specify the vodpod username:
    [ Insert Video Gallery username ] (without the spaces between the []).
    You can also specify username, number of thumbnails per page, and height of the iframe that holds the thumbnails (in that order):
    [ Insert Video Gallery username 16 280 ] (without the spaces between the [])

Disclaimers: This plugin looks best on themes that have a content area that is wider than the video player (425px) which is most of them. It has been tested in Firefox, Safari, IE 7, and IE 6, and IE 5. I have attempted to do as many things “the right way” as possible. But I also needed to get something running for a site as quickly as possible. So there is a certain amount of hackiness. I have been improving that along the way. If you find bugs, please let me know and I will try to fix those as soon as possible.

Like this plugin? Please consider donating by clicking the ‘Donate’ button in the sidebar. Enjoy!

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11 Responses to “Video Gallery Plugin”

  1. Abdul Says:
    July 1st, 2008 at 6:00 pm

    hi,
    Thank you xondie for this great pluging, I started using Vodpod.com a month ago, I like the way it works with my new self hosted wordpress http://soccernewstv.com, every thing works fine, I just wanna know if there is an option to add different pods to different pages, I am planing to collect more videos with vodpod but the only problem is how can I use these pods on one website.
    In other words I need to use multiple pods in on blog or website, is that possible with vodpod-video-gallery-v0.4 pluging or not?
    Thank you.

  2. xondie Says:
    July 1st, 2008 at 8:15 pm

    You’re very welcome, Abdul! That is a great idea. I’m sure that a lot of people would like that capability.

    I’m swamped today and tomorrow, but check back here Thursday night and I’ll see if I can incorporate multiple pods into the plugin.

  3. Abdul Says:
    July 1st, 2008 at 10:41 pm

    Thank you xondie,
    There is an other issue witch is templates, I looked for one that I can use with vodpod but I couldn’t find a template that is designed or at least optimized to Vodpod use.
    Thank you in advance.

  4. xondie Says:
    July 4th, 2008 at 1:46 am

    OK, multiple galleries within one WordPress site is now supported! You can optionally configure individual galleries on different pages with vodpod usernames, videos per page, and height of the thumbnail gallery iframe that is different from the configured defaults. You do not need to set any or all of these values for a gallery.

    I also added a link back to a user’s pod at the bottom (at the very reasonable request of the vodpod folks).

    I discovered a bug that I guess no one had noticed - the previous page arrow link didn’t always work right. That has been fixed.

    I also did a little bit more code cleanup.

    Abdul, the video galleries should look pretty good in any template that has a content area width of 425px or greater. You could make it look good in a template that is more narrow than that, but you’d have to do a little code changing to the width of the video player and to the widths set in the CSS. Is the problem that your templates are too narrow? Or is there some other reason why it doesn’t look good. On your site that you link to from your comment, your video gallery looks great.

  5. xondie Says:
    July 4th, 2008 at 2:54 am

    We just fixed an IE 5 bug - it now centers and lines up nicely like in all the other browsers. So we’re up to v0.6 now.

  6. Abdul Says:
    July 5th, 2008 at 12:46 am

    Thank you xondie, I will work on it tomorrow in my website and I will let you know about any problems, Thank you.

  7. Riisens Says:
    July 8th, 2008 at 7:27 am

    Hi there xondie,

    Your plugin seems great.

    However I seem to have a problem with your plugin. I´ve uploaded the plugin and installed it. Set it up to my vodpod account, and everything seems fine. Then ive created a new page, called videogallery. However when i past the “[Insert Video Gallery]” into my page nothing happens. What am i doing wrong?

    Thanks in advance

  8. xondie Says:
    July 8th, 2008 at 4:46 pm

    Hi Riisens,

    One common cause I have seen of similar problems with various plugins is that sometimes when we copy and paste something, some hidden html tags get copied with it. To make sure this is not the case for you, switch to the “html” view within your page editor and make sure there is no hidden code around or within the [Insert Video Gallery].

    If that doesn’t fix it, perhaps point me to the url where you are trying to add the video gallery and I can see if anything jumps out at me.

  9. Riisens Says:
    July 8th, 2008 at 10:27 pm

    Hi Xondie,

    Thanks for your reply.

    After i messed around with it for a while i found out what the problem was. Being rather new to Wordpress i thought i could edit the page in my “Themes editor” (that is messing with the PHP coding), AND pasting your code in the “Manage” “Page” side of wordpress. I thought that it was the same page i was working on. Then i found out that was not the case (i think). Anyway my problem was, that i had been working on the PHP side, and somehow confused Wordpress to overwrite the input form the “manage”, “Page” side (even though my PHP code could validate). Nothing i typed in, would be presented.

    My solution (which works) was to delete the page, and then start a fresh, and now it works fine!

    Anyway thanks for your help, your great plugin and your quick reply!

  10. Isaac Alexander Says:
    August 15th, 2008 at 1:33 am

    Thanks for creating a great program. Do you plan to post more links to sites that use your program? Also, will your plug work in other environments like drupal, joomla, etc…?

  11. xondie Says:
    August 15th, 2008 at 12:22 pm

    Hi Isaac, I hadn’t thought to post links to sites using the video gallery. I would love for those using the plugin to post a comment letting everyone know. I can see from my visitor tracking some sites that are using it but I’m not sure that the owners of all of them have officially “launched” their sites since a few of them look to be in progress. It’s a great idea though - I think I will work on putting a list up after I get permission from site owners to post their links.

    It does not currently work with any other CMS. I may actually port this plugin over to Drupal, but I need to work with Drupal just a little more before I feel confident enough to do so. I have no plans to create a Joomla version at this point.

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