YouTube: YouTube Video & Playlist Plugin

plugins
1

YouTube: you too can youtube!

License: Apache

This FarCry plugin provides integration with YouTube. It will sync both videos and playlists from a specified account.

This plugin has been tested on ColdFusion 9.0.1 and FarCry 6.0.14. It should work in FarCry 6.1.x and older FarCry 6.0.x versions as well.

youtube-3.jpg859×685 69 KB

youtube-2.jpg1282×784 167 KB

youtube-1.jpg1310×775 129 KB

At its foundation, the plugin works via two custom types and a scheduled task. The scheduled task runs and uses the YouTube API to grab the playlists and videos on the specified account (configurable via a FarCry config). If it finds those objects already in FarCry, it updates them with the latest data from YouTube, if its new, it adds it to the FarCry database. Any items found in FarCry that aren’t returned by the API are deleted. The plugin gives you the ability to reorder the videos on a playlist via the FarCry webtop.

All data is managed on the YouTube side. I may consider adding the ability to completely manage the videos and playlists on the webtop, but that will greatly increase the complexity of the plugin, and I don’t see a great benefit to doing so. To me, it makes more sense to go straight to the source to upload new videos, manage your videos, etc rather than try to stuff all that functionality into a FarCry form. No need to reinvent the wheel, in my opinion.

The plugin also includes two rules. One lists videos based on selected playlists or videos, the other displays an embedded video.

2

There is one benefit at least to adding more management from the webtop. Right now I’m participating in the development of a site where the visitors/users should be able to upload videos - would be cool if we could add such functionality with the use of a FC plugin. Right now I’m looking at Raymond Camdens YouTube CFC for handling this.

3

We have had such a plugin in the past, using JWPlayer to play videos. We’ve moved away from that and towards using 3rd party video hosters like YouTube. It means not having to figure out how to extract thumbnails, use different players/encodings for iPhone vs desktop, and storing and serving large amounts of data. Most of the better hosters also have APIs - for a couple of clients we have a UI in FarCry that just uploads videos to BrightCove.