SuperShow is a widget to show RSS feeds from YouTube in a beautiful and engaging way with thumbnails or even video embeds. A useful addition for almost every community—whether you have your own video channel or just want to show content from around your community topic.
What’s needed:
- your PHP settings need to allow loading external files (allow_url_fopen) and support SimpleXML calls to external sources
- You can test your server setup in advance with this test script. Download the ZIP and extract it to your website’s root directory. Call the file from the browser and check the output. If you see a list of video titles, your current PHP setup is supported. If you see an error message, you cannot currently use SuperShow. (Don’t forget to delete the file after the test.)
Features/Settings:
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Supported Feeds:
- YouTube: Channels and Playlists
- Film Roll – Show 3 thumbnails from the video
- Columns – three, two or one video columns which collapse if necessary (setting not used in the sidebar)
- Video embed – embed the video itself instead of just showing a thumbnail (setting not used in the sidebar)
- Number of entries (maximum values are defined through YouTube)
- Use hi-res thumbnail
- Show channel name for each video (useful for playlists which include content from different creators)
- Show subscribe button (for YouTube channel feeds) below the feed
Notes:
- The Vimeo widget available in version before 1.1.0 has been removed since Vimeo limited its RSS feed.
- The content, ordering and maximum number of items is entirely defined through the YouTube RSS feeds. I cannot influence it. For example: YouTube channel feeds show the latest video first, but YouTube playlists use the order of the playlist itself. If you want to change the order of a playlist feed, you would have to change it on YouTube.
- Colors are inherited from the active theme without any additional settings. If something looks odd, please adjust your theme colors.
- Caching is handled through the IPS core software and defined by your settings for sidebar/block caching.
- Just as the RSS feeds are public, the SuperShow feeds are public by default. There are no permission settings.
- The widget just styles the publicly available RSS feeds. Should YouTube limit or stop their RSS feeds, this plugin will stop working. You have been warned. 😉
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Live demo
Preview
Installation & Usage Instructions
Installing SuperShow:
- Install the plugin through the ACP Plugin section
- Open your website in a desktop browser as an admin
- Open the front-end block manager by clicking the arrow on the side of the screen
- Open the Supershow widget category
- Drag the SuperShow widget anywhere on your page. The widgets will work both in the sidebar and the content area, although the functionality will differ slightly.
- You can drag as many different video feed widgets on a page as you like.
Configuring the widgets:
- While still being in the Manage Blocks mode, click the Edit button over the SuperShow widgets you have added.
- Adjust the settings to pick the feed and the styling you want.
- SuperShow uses public RSS feeds to retrieve the videos from YouTube and Vimeo. SuperShow will create the correct RSS feed URL itself. You only need to select the correct content type (channel, playlist, group …) and add the identifier key which YouTube uses.
Finding the YouTube content id:
- For a channel, see this Google article: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/3250431?hl=en
- For a playlist, open a video from the playlist, then check the browser address bar. It will look this this and the playlist ID starts with PL: youtube.com/watch?v=h-demgKLZJM&list=PLsNB4peY6C6JzXyhabO-6Knx7nu53fL2x
- Copy just the highlighted part and add it to your SuperShow widget