Adding a Featured Video Section to a Wordpress Homepage

On my homepage, you will notice I have a featured video section. To create this section I did the following:

- Install the Video Quicktags plugin by the legend that is Viper (viper007) – dont forget to make a donation

Without using this plugin, and by adding the embeding code directly, I had nothing but a ton of script errors in IE, but as always Firefox was perfect!

- Create a Featured Video category.

- Set the area on your homepage where you want your videos to be displayed, to hit posts from this category.

- Add a post.

- Within the post, create a Custom Field. Call it for example, Video_Link, and for the value, add a quicktag to the video you want to display, e.g.


[ viddler id=bc656bb0&w=280&h=166 ]


where w is the width and h is the height.

- Open home.php in the wordpress editor, and locate the area which you have set to display your featured videos.

- Comment out the following:

<a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark"><?php the_title(); ?></a>
<? php the_content_limit(80, ""); ?>

- Add replace with:

// If post contains a vid_link custom field
<?php $vid_link = get_post_meta($post->ID, 'Video_Link', $single = true);
if($vid_link !== '') {
// first display the title
?>
<a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark"><?php the_title(); ?></a>
<?php
       // Get the contents of the value of the custom field and apply Quicktag filter
$vid_link = apply_filters('the_content', $vid_link);
      // display video
echo $vid_link;
}
?>

You might notice that if you have other plugins installed, such as TweetMe or Share/Save buttons, unless you have unchecked the ‘display on home page’ checkbox on the plugin settings, this will also be displayed with the video (from the apply_filters command), so I would recommend checking this option to hide them in the home page.

Related posts:

1. Getting started with Wordpress and SEO, Video by Matt Cutts and Wordcamp 2009
2. Wordpress on IIS Cannot Handle 404 File Not Found