YouTube Channel
VideoDisplay multiple videos quickly and easily.
YouTube Made Easy
Transform your Concrete CMS website into a seamless video hub with YouTube Channel - the elegant solution for showcasing your YouTube content. This powerful add-on creates instant, interactive galleries that load lightning-fast, using smart thumbnails and smooth AJAX playback to keep visitors engaged. Whether you're featuring 3 videos or 30, YouTube Channel delivers a premium viewing experience with 3 built-in color schemes and custom theming capabilities to match your site perfectly.
Live Demo
The official Concrete CMS YouTube Channel (black color scheme):
Features
- Instant Channel Integration: Connect any YouTube channel to your website in seconds, with automatic updates whenever new videos are added - zero maintenance!
- Smart Space Management: Display 3 to 30+ videos in a compact thumbnail layout that expands to a single player - perfect for clean, organized presentation.
- Seamless Viewing Experience: AJAX-powered playback eliminates page refreshes, delivering smooth transitions between videos for enhanced user engagement.
- Flexible Styling Options: Choose from black, white, or grey color schemes, with the flexibility to create custom themes to match your brand perfectly.
- Complete Mobile Support: Fully responsive design ensures your videos look great on every device.
- Flexible Channel Options: Six different channel types available - from uploads to playlists - plus control over related videos and upload date display.
- Performance Optimized: Smart thumbnail loading ensures fast page loads even with larger video collections.
- Multi-Block Capability: Place multiple YouTube Channel blocks anywhere on your site with individual width controls for versatile content presentation.
- Still Going Strong: Originally launched in July 2011, it has been regularly upgraded to support the latest versions of Concrete CMS.
Beginner Tips
- You need to obtain a free YouTube API Key to use this add-on. To create an API key, follow these steps:
- Go to the Google Cloud Console.
- Select a project, or create a new one (top left corner of page, next to "Google Cloud" logo).
- At the top of the page, click "Enable APIs & Services" button. In the list of APIs, search for "YouTube Data API v3" and make sure the status is ON.
- Go back to the cloud console home, and on the left sidebar, click "Credentials".
- Click the "Create Credentials" button at the top of the page, and choose "API Key".
- Copy the API Key and then go back to YouTube Channel add-on to paste the key. Keep a record of this.
- For additional security, it's recommended to limit the API key so it can only be used on your website. Next to the API key on the list, click the 3 dots on the far right and click "Edit Key" (or the API key's name). Under "Set an application restriction", choose a restriction to suit your preference (such as by "website" or "IP address"). This will prevent malicious users from seeing your API key and using it on their own websites.
- If you're not sure of the YouTube Channel ID or name, use this free tool to look it up. Just copy and paste the channel URL (eg. https://www.youtube.com/@ConcreteCMS_official), and the result will look like this:
Try copying and pasting the "Channel ID", and if that doesn't work, then the "Channel Owner".
Advanced Tips
- Custom style instructions: To create your own custom color scheme, simply copy the code below into your active theme's CSS file, and change the colors as preferred:
You may also choose to create a custom block template by copying the view.php and youtubechannel.css files into a new folder in the "templates" folder and renaming youtubechannel.css to view.css. So the folder structure should look like this (where "yourblocktemplatename" is a name of your choosing (no spaces):
/templates/yourblocktemplatename/view.css
/templates/yourblocktemplatename/view.php
Installation
This is a basic block, and no extra page attributes or Dashboard pages are installed.
FAQs
Use this free tool to look it up. Just copy and paste the channel URL and it will display the information you need.
No, it's completely free to signup and use. Some of the other APIs offered by Google are on a paid basis or have a free tier. But the "YouTube Data API v3" should be free for the volume of traffic that most business websites receive.
This add-on uses the YouTube API to pull the latest videos from the selected channel. It can take YouTube up to an hour or two to process new videos after uploading, depending on their length. From there, they are made available to the API within a few hours.
If your API key has been entered correctly, then the most likely cause is that your video, playlist or channel is set to "private" on YouTube. The YouTube API can only pull "public" videos. Once you've changed your private video to public, it can take up to an hour to be available on the YouTube API.