Wordpress tutorials, Wordpress themes, PHP Tips

Show the latest videos from a youtube channel with Youtube GDATA Api – WordPress widget

admin — Sat, 16 Jul 2011 16:38:40 +0000

The purpose of this tutori al is to create a widget that will show the latest videos from a particular Youtube user. For this tutorial we will use some JQuery magic and the power of Youtube GDATA Api.

The Widget structure

WordPress Widgets (WPW) is like a plugin, but designed to provide a simple way to arrange the various elements of your sidebar content (known as “widgets”) without having to change any code.

Here we have the structure of the widget (the widget class), each method is commented so you can understand what it means.

/* YOUTUBE WIDGET */
class YT_Channel_Latest_Videos extends WP_Widget {

	// the widget constructor
    function YT_Channel_Latest_Videos() {
        parent::WP_Widget(false, $name = 'Youtube latest videos');
		parent::__construct(__CLASS__, 'Youtube latest videos', array(
			'classname' => __CLASS__,
			'description' => "This widget will show the latest videos from a youtube user."
		));
    }

	// content of the widget - front-end
    function widget($args, $instance) {

    }

	// get the options
    function update($new_instance, $old_instance) {

    }

	// the form that shows in your administration area - here you insert the widget options
    function form($instance) {

    }

}

// register the widget
add_action('widgets_init', create_function('', 'register_widget("YT_Channel_Latest_Videos");'));

We will take it step by step, first we need to create the interface that will show up in the admin area, there you must be able to enter some options and save them in the database.

	// the form that shows in your administration area - here you insert the widget options
    function form($instance) {
        $title     = esc_attr($instance['title']);
        $channel   = esc_attr($instance['channel']);
        $nr_videos = esc_attr($instance['nr_videos']);
		?>
		
          Title:
          
        
		
			Youtube channel:
			
		
		
			Number of videos to show:
			
		
        
Update the options: 
	// get the options
    function update($new_instance, $old_instance) {
		$instance = $old_instance;
		$instance['title']     = strip_tags($new_instance['title']);
		$instance['channel']   = strip_tags($new_instance['channel']);
		$instance['nr_videos'] = strip_tags($new_instance['nr_videos']);
		return $instance;
    }

Next we extract the latest videos from a given user using the power of jQuery (the javascript code is commented):
	// content of the widget - front-end
    function widget($args, $instance) {
		remove_action("wp_print_footer_scripts", array(__CLASS__, 'remove_enqueued_script'));
		extract( $args );
		$title     = apply_filters('widget_title', $instance['title']);
		?>
			
			

			

			
				Loading results...
			

			
		
 The widget code is ready,  now we need to pack it  in a plugin so it can be released to the  public. 
Packing it in a plugin
WordPress Plugin: A WordPress Plugin is a program, or a set of one or more functions, written in the PHP scripting language, that adds a specific set of features or services to the WordPress weblog, which can be seamlessly integrated with the weblog using access points and methods provided by the WordPress Plugin Application Program Interface (API).
For the plugin is easy, in the plugins directory create a file named latest-youtube-videos-widget.php and the following piece of code in the header of the file:


Then copy the widget code and its done. 
You can download the final plugin file from here: latest-youtube-videos-widget.zip

Premium wordpress themes that can turn your blog into an arcade website

admin — Sun, 17 Apr 2011 16:08:51 +0000

With minimal WordPress knowledge anyone can modify a theme and transform it into an arcade theme so I made a compilation of one of the best themes from Themeforest that with some changes can turn your blog into an arcade website.

MyMagazine – Stylish Portal News Site

This theme was created with content rich websites in mind. It can be used for media and videogames sites as well as news sites and technology portals alike. It is very easy to configure and makes running a news portal as easy as it gets.

LeetPress – A Gaming WordPress Theme

LeetPress is a WordPress gaming theme with all the features you need to create a great gaming site, such as reviews, videos and screenshots. Compatible with the latest version of WordPress.

ReviewIt – Review & Community WordPress Theme

ReviewIt provides you with a powerful review and community theme, that is also 100% BuddyPress compatible!

Premium image content sliders for WordPress

admin — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 19:34:39 +0000

Are you searching for a cool content slider for your WordPress blog? Here I have selected some of the best sliders from Codecanyon.

1. Slider PRO – WordPress Premium Slider Plugin

Slider PRO is one of the most powerful slider plugins for WordPress on the market (some buyers have been saying that it’s actually the best). The slider offers you 100+ customizable properties, 100+ possible transition effects, 10+ skins and much more.

Slider Pro

2. uBillboard – Premium Slider for WordPress

uBillboard is a slider for WordPress. We have been developing sliders for our WordPress themes for over a year now, and all that experience has been distilled into this one slider plugin. It is a premium quality jQuery-based slider with a nicely polished WordPress admin.

uBillboard

3. DDSliderWP – 11 Transitions – Slide Manager Panel

DDSliderWP features EVERYTHING that the jQuery plugin already offered PLUS a custom admin panel, with total management of slides.

DDSliderWP

4. Lowrider Triple Slider

Lowrider Triple Slider is a non-traditional slider for WordPress.

Install and configure as a WordPress plugin.
Drag and drop images into slides you create in the WP admin.
Hook a blog post to each slide so the slide links to a post.

Lowrider Triple Slider

5. Slider gallery shortcode

This plugin creates a new shortcode for WordPress. With this new shortcode, you can create a slider gallery in seconds just by typing [slider] while you’ re writing your post or page. The slider will display the images that you have uploaded to the current post or page.

Slider Gallery Shortcode

Autopost Mochiads games in your WordPress arcade website

admin — Sat, 29 May 2010 02:07:45 +0000

The Mochi Publisher program allows you to post games automatically to your website but to do so the developer should have minimal knowledge of PHP. In this tutorial I will show you how you can add this feature to your wordpress arcade website.

Overview of auto post feature

The Auto Post feature allows you to add a game to your site with a single click. By implementing our API on your site, you’ll be able to browse the Mochi Game Distribution catalog of games and click “add to my site”. This will send all the important game data via the API to your url, where you can store and display the game automatically. Here’s a high level overview of how the API works:

1. User clicks “add game to my site”
2. Mochi servers make an HTTP request to a URL you supply in your publisher settings
3. game_tag is contained inside of the request’s POST data
4. Your site implementation should then call back to get a Mochi URL supplying it with your publisher ID and the game ID
5. Once we confirm the publisher ID and game ID matches our records, we return the full game data which you can import and process

You request a feed from Mochi Media:

http://www.mochimedia.com/feeds/games/{PUB_ID}/{GAME_TAG}/?format=json;

You can find all the documentation on Mochi Media official website: http://www.mochimedia.com/support/pub_docs

WordPress integration

Enough with the teory, this is the code:

set_time_limit(0);
//error_reporting(0);
// include the configuration file and  the file that keeps the wordpress functions
include ('wp-config.php');
include ('wp-blog-header.php');

$publisher_key = "xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx";

if (isset($_REQUEST['game_tag'])) {
	$urlrequest = "http://www.mochiads.com/feeds/games/".$publisher_key."/".$_REQUEST['game_tag']."/?format=json";
	$gamearr = json_decode(file_get_contents($urlrequest),true);
	$game = $gamearr['games'][0];
	//print_r ($game);
	addToDB($game);
}

function addToDB($game)
{
	$name = mysql_escape_string($game['name']);
	$description = mysql_escape_string($game['description']);
	$swf = mysql_escape_string($game['swf_url']);
	$thumb = mysql_escape_string($game['thumbnail_url']);
	$width = $game['width'];
	$height = $game['height'];
	$keywords = $game['tags'];
	$instructions = mysql_escape_string($game['instructions']);

	$cats = array();
	$categories = $game['categories'];
	for($x=0;$x 1, //The user ID number of the author.
		'post_category' => $cats, // Add some categories.
		'post_content' => $description, // The full  text of the post.
		'post_status' => 'publish', //Set the status of the new post.
		'post_title' => $name,//The title of your post.
		'post_type' => 'post', // post type
		'tags_input' => $keywd //For tags.
	);
	// Insert the post into the database
	$post_id = wp_insert_post($post);
	// adding the custom fields, these custom fields are compatible with Emanuele Feronato's Mochi plugin
	add_post_meta($post_id, 'width', $width);
	add_post_meta($post_id, 'height', $height);
	add_post_meta($post_id, 'thumbnail_url', $thumb);
	add_post_meta($post_id, 'swf_url', $swf);
	add_post_meta($post_id, 'instructions', $instructions);

}

So, my friends, just paste this code in a php file, let’s name it autopost.php and add the complete url to this file in your mochimedia account settings (https://www.mochimedia.com/pub/settings):

If you want to create a WordPress arcade website but you don’t have WordPress skills you can buy my WordPress Arcade Theme.

Dealing with the Youtube GData API

admin — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 17:28:57 +0000

Using SimpleXML we will parse the Youtube feed to show today’s top videos.

The feed link is:

http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/standardfeeds/top_rated?time=today&start-index=1&max-results=5

it contains today’ s top 5 videos. If you want to know more about the Youtube Gdata Api you can start by reading the API Reference Guide.

This is the feed structure:



  tag:youtube.com,2008:standardfeed:us:top_rated
  2009-12-31T07:42:51.000-08:00
  
  Top Rated
  http://www.youtube.com/img/pic_youtubelogo_123x63.gif
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
    YouTube
    http://www.youtube.com/
  
  YouTube data API
  100
  2
  1
  
    tag:youtube.com,2008:video:9DTWIYIgkrk
    2009-12-30T22:36:23.000Z
    2009-12-31T16:00:04.000Z
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    RACING THROUGH  COSTCO!  (12/29/09-300th!!!)
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
      SHAYTARDS
      http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/shaytards
    
    
      
    
    
      Entertainment
      
      
      
      SHAYTARDS
      My Twitter http://www.twitter.com/shaycarl

My Dailybooth http://www.dailybooth.com/shaycarl
      shaycarl, shaytards, costco, love, the, smell, of, new, balls
      
      
      
      
      
      
        RACING THROUGH COSTCO!  (12/29/09-300th!!!)
      widescreen
      
      2009-12-30T22:36:23.000Z
      9DTWIYIgkrk

Now, I will load the xml file using simplexml_load_file:

$feed = "http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/standardfeeds/top_rated?start-index=1&max-results=1&time=today";
$xml = simplexml_load_file($feed);
echo '';
print_r($xml);
echo '';

As you see I check the simplexml object structure using print_r($xml), this will help me to see how can I parse the xml  response from youtube.

To get the informations for every video I will parse every  node in the Youtube GData response, so the previous code becomes:
$feed = "http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/standardfeeds/top_rated?start-index=2&max-results=1&time=today";
// load xml
$xml = simplexml_load_file($feed);
// parse every node  to get the video information
foreach ($xml->entry as $video) {
	echo ''.$video->title.'

'; // video title
	echo ''.$video->content.'

'; // video content
	// media: namespace
    $media = $video->children('http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/');
	echo 'Tags: '.$media->group->keywords.'
'; // video tags
	echo 'Video url: '.$media->group->player->attributes()->url.'
'; // video url
	echo 'Uploaded by '.$video->author->name.'
'; // author name
	echo '';
}

$video->title – gets the video title from the  node “title”

$video->children(‘http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/’) – gets the nodes in  media: namespace

$media->group->keywords – gets the video tags from the    node

$media->group->player->attributes()->url – gets the video url from the  node

This was only a simple example of using the incredible Youtube GData API,  I hope  you  liked it.

WordPress Arcade Theme released

admin — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 23:22:52 +0000

I’m glad to announce you that from today I’m offering for sale a brand new WordPress Arcade Theme, this is how it looks:

The theme has an options page where you can add the featured games:

To ease the process of adding games, I made a custom admin page where you can add the game details:

Also, this arcade theme is compatible with Emanuele Feronato’s Mochiads plugin.

Update: This theme was tested with the latest version of WordPress, it supports now widgets and custom menus. Very easy to customize, all you need to do is to install the theme, enter the theme options, import the games and forget it!

Check live demo

Pricing:

Standard licence: only 9$ (you cannot redistribute or resell the theme) – the lowest price in the market!

If you want to buy this theme or you have any questions about it, contact me here or by email: alexandru.raduta(at)gmail(dot) com

For suggestions please post a comment.

Add an mp3 player in your blog post

admin — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 21:10:00 +0000

In this tutorial I will show you a simple way to add an mp3 player in your blog posts using shortcodes.
For the start I chose an open source mp3 player that can be downloaded from here. The swf file, from this player, must be uploaded in the same directory with your default wordpress theme (Ex. /wp-content/theme-name/).
Add this piece of code in your functions.php file:

function show_player($atts) {
 extract(shortcode_atts(array(
 'path' => '',
 'width' => '200',
 'height' => '20'
 ), $atts));
 return '
 
 
 ';
 }

add_shortcode('mp3', 'show_player');

Next, if you want to add the player in your blog post you can simply add this shortcode anywhere in your page:

[mp3 path="wp-content/uploads/song.mp3"]

Or if you want to customize the size of your player you can add:

[mp3 path="wp-content/uploads/song.mp3" width="100" height="10"]

It’ s that simple!

6 examples of featured content sliders

admin — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 01:14:42 +0000

Below I selected 6 tutorials on how to create a nice featured content slider for your site.

1. jQuery UI tabs + Featured content = love

This example uses the jQuery UI library.

2. An Elegant Featured Content Slider for WordPress

In this tutorial John Sexton creates a nice content slider based on “Coda slider effect”

3. Creating a Slick Auto-Playing Featured Content Slider

4. Image rotator with preview

A very well explained tutorial about creating an image rotator, perfect for an image gallery or portofolio site.

5. Feature List

A jQuery plugin that cycles items via slideshow.

6. Create Featured Content Slider Using jQuery UI

Another featured content slider that uses the jQuery UI library.

Coming soon!

admin — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 17:43:34 +0000

The blog is still under construction.