WordPress Video Galleries

Overview

Information about implementing galleries of videos in WordPress.

There doesn't seem to be a solution for combining videos in image galleries. The image gallery plugin that I have used is NextGEN Gallery which doesn't support videos.

YouTube/Video galleries

YouTube SimpleGallery WordPress plugin

Despite the name, this plugin also supports Vimeo videos, and can combine them in a gallery with YouTube videos.

Gotchas: Thumbnails not showing up

Looks like this issue was fixed in the plugin as of v2.0.6.

Using the Timthumb option, thumbnails images were broken.

Tracked this down to the use of get_bloginfo('url') to create the thumbnail URLs.

The thumbnail URLs are basically the Timthumb script URL with the image URL as an argument.

get_bloginfo('url') returns the "Site Address URL" as defined in the WP dashboard. This is the URL of the site itself.

site_url() returns the "WordPress Address URL" as defined in the WP dashboard, which is the URL of the WP installation.

The result was that the URL of the Timthumb script was missing the WP root directory, which is an easy thing to miss.

The fix was to edit [WP_ROOT]/wp-content/plugins/youtube-simple/inc/shortcode.php, search for timthumb and replace get_bloginfo('url') with site_url().

Gotchas: Shadowbox JS having no effect

Symptom: For some reason after an upgrade to Wordpress 3.6, YouTube SimpleGallery 2.0.6, and Shadowbox JS 3.0.3.10.2, the call to Shadowbox.init() was throwing an error: 'Shadowbox is not defined.'

Effect: Clicking a video thumbnail in a YouTube SimpleGallery gallery will redirect to the video's page on YouTube.com or Vimeo.com instead of playing the video in a lightbox over the current page.

Cause: Again, after this particular upgrade, the Shadowbox library was being added to the footer. This is done explicitly by the plugin, and it causes the Shadowbox library to be defined after the call to Shadowbox.init().

Solution: Hacked the Shadowbox JS plugin to include the Shadowbox library in the template header.

Update wp_register_scirpt() call in the ShadowboxFrontend::scripts() routine found in [PLUGINS_DIR]/shadowbox-js/inc/frontend.php:

// wp_register_script ( 'shadowbox' , apply_filters ( 'shadowbox-js' , $shadowbox ) , $dependency , $this->sbversion , true );
/* change in_footer option of wp_register_script() to 'false' */
wp_register_script ( 'shadowbox' , apply_filters ( 'shadowbox-js' , $shadowbox ) , $dependency , $this->sbversion , false );

Gotchas: Updating the plugin

• See the issue with thumbnails not showing up. This fix needs to be applied after an update unless it's changed by the authors.
• The plugin has a PHP call to session_start() around line 137 of youtube_simplegallery.php and line 236 of inc/shortcode.php (removed as of v2.0.5) which throw PHP E_NOTICE messages when WP_DEBUG is set to True.
  To avoid these errors replace with:
  

$sid = session_id();
if (empty($sid)) {
	session_start();
}

• Call to session_destory() around line 149 of youtube_simplegallery.php removes all keys from the session, not just YTSG keys. Comment it out.

Gotchas: Vimeo images not showing up

• The vimeo domain was not included in the list of allowed sites for the Timthumb script. This has been fixed as of version 2.0.4.

Usage

• BayKids Films page

Galleries of uploaded videos

Saw that there was at least one plugin that looked very good, but haven't had to implement this yet.