I was messing around earlier, trying to create a new Wordpress plugin from scratch. Basically it would allow users to easily post YouTube movies on their blogs as well as creating some kind of gallery. The current YouTube API is worthless when it comes to pulling up your favorites; it only returns the 10 most recent entries. If you want to have a gallery of more than 10, then it’d be pretty difficult. I also wanted the plugin to use the Thickbox effect as well.

I managed to get this far:
[youtube]FGvlNdtNTj4[/youtube]

You should be seeing a thumbnail image that you can click, and the Thickbox pops up with the YouTube video embeded in it. When I wrote this post, I had the YouTube video ID between some [youtube] tags. So the plugin finds that and replaces it with the image. It is REALLY in its crude stages right now. I’m having problems having multiple XML parsers in one page (basically it’s conflicting with my YouTube Videos on the sidebar), so I need more time to figure that one out.

I also managed to spruce up my favorites gallery. That one was a little bit more tricky to use. I made use of the wordpress link management system and made a SQL call to get them. So basically I’m using the link table with the YouTube ID, movie title, and movie thumbnail URL as columns. If you see the code, you’d know it was a hack job. Bleh. To that end, I added a whole bunch more videos to my favorites.

Edit: It looks like the changes I made somehow has Thickbox and Lightbox in conflict as well. Therefore the flickr plugin on my sidebar ain’t workin.

So having conquered my little piece of the youtube API, I decided to tackle Amazon’s. Wasn’t that difficult either; I had to do a little digging, but I eventually found the REST operators. Popped those babies and BAM! I got a nice ‘wanted list’ on the left sidebar and an Amazon Wanted List section. Hmm… what API should I mess with next…

The API for developers offered by YouTube interested me. I had no experience with that kind of programming, but I decided to give it a whirl. At first there’s not much documentation on how to actually implement methods that use the API, but persistence and a lot of googling, and I was able to utilize it right away. The tricky part: finding a way to import the XML document and parse it for my own use. The XML document returned by the YouTube API depends on the method sent, but it basically returns information that is stored on YouTube such as my profile information, my video information, or even my favorite video information.

At first I tried to do it with Javascript, but I found that a security measure prevents me from importing XML docs from remote servers. That lead me to PHP; ah, my beloved PHP. Once I figured out how to parse the XML doc, I just had to find a way of utilizing the information. The next step: creating a PHP class. This has nothing to do directly with the API, but I hadn’t created a class or done any OOP in PHP before. A couple hours and voila: a random favorite YouTube movie bar on the right and a YouTube section that will automatically update when I add/remove movies on my YouTube profile. Basically, this saves me the trouble of maintaining that section at all if I do any modifications on my YouTube lists. Hazzah!