Maria’s Guides

Displaying a list of your recent Viddler videos in your WordPress blog.

If you start using Viddler regularly — either to create video blog entries as discussed in the previous article of this series or to simply get video content online — you might want to make those videos accessible from within your WordPress blog. Fortunately, there’s a WordPress plugin that makes this very easy: viddlerRSS.

The ViddlerRSS plugin works like most other WordPress plugins. Drop it in your plugins folder and activate it. (You can learn more about how to do that in our WordPress book, so don’t expect to find details here.) Then open your WordPress dashboard and choose Options > viddlerRSS. Enter your Username in the appropriate box, select the number of videos to display and, if desired, enter the HTML code you want before and after each video thumbnail. Then click Update viddlerRSS.

Now roll up your sleeves and open the template file where you want to insert the Viddler video thumbnails. (Need help modifying theme files? You can learn about that to do that in our WordPress book, too.) In most cases, this will be your sidebar.php template. Insert the following code into the file where you want the thumbnails to appear: <?php get_viddlerrss(); ?>

Or you can get fancy like I did and put some intelligence into it, in case you ever need to disable the viddlerRSS plugin. Here’s the code I use, which includes a heading and other formatting settings:

<?php if (function_exists('get_viddlerrss')) { ?>
<li>
<h2>My Latest Viddler Videos</h2>
<?php get_viddlerrss(); ?>
</li>
<?php } ?>

Save the changes to your template file.

Now check your blog to see the results of your efforts. As shown here, I’ve got viddlerRSS set up to display thumbnails for my most recent three videos in my blog’s sidebar. Pointing to a video’s thumbnail displays the title of the video, which can help people decide whether they want to view it. Clicking a thumbnail image opens the video on the Viddler site.

Easy enough, right?

The next (and last) article in this series will explain how you can include a video commenting feature in your WordPress blog. Stay tuned!