PHP My Video Blog WordPress plugin

I recently purchased the PHP My Video Blog WordPress plugin to help update some of my sites. myVideoBlog will automatically grab videos from popular sites such as YouTube based on your custom parameters and create new posts with the information. Like many WordPress plugins it works great but is just missing a key feature or two.

In the case of PHP My Video Blog, it’s using the YouTube v2.0 API to pull results, which has been officially deprecated as of March 4, 2014. It will work for at least a year but then will need to be upgraded to v3.0. Since their ‘Forum’ and ‘Contact’ pages are empty, I’m guessing I’ll have to do it myself at some point.

As for right now, the plugin’s YouTube v2.0 API calls only work on keywords and not key phrases. For instance, trying to get YouTube videos for “my search term” would instead return videos with keywords “my”, “search” and “term”. That’s the biggest complaint I’ve seen for this plugin. I thought that was a huge lack of functionality, so I changed my API requests to grab key phrases instead. Now, “my search term” only returns videos with “my search term”. If you need to do the same, the process is simple.

First, select and use Add Video Source from the Dashboard menu like normal. Then select My Video Sources and Edit the video source.

Now edit the source input box with our changed YouTube v2.0 API query format.

By default it should look like this:

http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos/-/People/epic/fail?max-results=50&lr=en&alt=atom&v=2&orderby=published


Replace that with this format using %22 as URL-escaped quotation marks:

http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos?category=People&max-results=50&lr=en&alt=atom&v=2&orderby=published&q=%22epic+fail%22

If you need further help searching for YouTube videos using the v2.0 API read the official Reference Guide.

[Update: A week after publishing this post the phpmyvideoblog website was taken down. It looks like no support for this plugin will be forthcoming so I will most likely write my own.]

[Update Aug 18th, 2014: Their website is back online but still no direct way to contact the author.]

[Update Sep 18th, 2014]
Another issue with PHPmyVideoBlog is it defines a function that completely wipes out the default cron_schedules that WordPress sets up, including any new cron_schedules added by other plugins. To fix this, edit the file mvb_main.php in the plugin directory and replace function more_reccurences() with:

function more_reccurences($schedules) {
//superblogme: add new schedules correctly
$schedules['once_half_hour'] = array('interval' => 1800, 'display' => 'Once Half an Hour');
$schedules['once_two_hour'] = array('interval' => 7200, 'display' => 'Once Two Hours');
$schedules['once_three_hour'] = array('interval' => 10800, 'display' => 'Once Three Hours');
$schedules['weekly'] = array('interval' => 604800, 'display' => 'Once Weekly');
return $schedules;
}

[Update Sep 24th, 2014]

Replacement plugin development -> Video Grabber Pro.