Every time I sit down to work on my youTube – Wordpress plug-in, I think of a alternative way to use it. And of course, there’s probably a whole load of existing plug-ins to do the job. But where’s the fun in that? At first it was all about making a list of videos appear in the sidebar. This works all very well but the video ids are hard-coded for now.
So the next step would be to included the video id in a post, as a piece of post meta data. The plug-in could query for posts under a certain category or tag. I could then lookup the post meta data for those posts from the ids and extract the video id that way.
There is still one consideration to make. At the moment, the video meta data from youTube is not cached. It gets requested every time a page loads. So it’s clear to me that the youTube video data should be acquired as soon as the post is published. There’s a Wordpress action hook available which I can use to save the results as post meta data.
I am not sure how much video I will shoot, nor how much data I want to save. Until I decide exactly what I want to do with it, I will probably leave it exactly the way it is.
