I am a huge Docker fan and run my own home and cloud server with it.

What is Docker?

“Docker is a platform that allows developers to create, deploy, and run applications in containers. Containers are lightweight, portable, and self-sufficient environments that can run an application and all its dependencies, making it easier to manage and deploy applications across different environments. Docker provides tools and services for building, shipping, and running containers, as well as a registry for storing and sharing container images.

With Docker, developers can package their applications as containers and deploy them anywhere, whether it’s on a laptop, a server, or in the cloud. Docker has become a popular technology for DevOps teams and has revolutionized the way applications are developed and deployed.”

Why this article series?

I am always looking for new ways to document the tools I use. This might help others to find interesting projects to enhance their own work or hobby life :)

I will have multiple series of this kind. I am starting with Docker this week, as it is at the core / a hub for many things I do. I often testdrive things locally, before deploying them to the cloud.

I am not concentrating on the installation of Docker itself, there are so many articles about that out there. You will have no problem to find help articles or videos detailing it for your platform.

Docker Compose or CLI?

Docker Compose and Docker CLI (Command Line Interface) are two different tools provided by Docker, although they are often used together.

Docker CLI is a command-line interface tool that allows users to interact with Docker and manage Docker containers, images, and networks from the terminal. It provides a set of commands that can be used to create, start, stop, and manage Docker containers, as well as to build and push Docker images.

Docker Compose, on the other hand, is a tool for defining and running multi-container Docker applications. It allows users to define a set of services and their dependencies in a YAML file and then start and stop the entire application with a single command. Docker Compose also provides a way to manage the lifecycle of the containers as a group, including scaling up and down the number of containers.

I prefer the use of Docker Compose, as it makes it easy to replicate and tweak a setup between different servers.

CLI to Composer YAML

There are tools like $composerize, which allow you to easily transform a CLI command into a composer file. Also a nice way to easily combine multiple commands into a clean configuration.

Portainer – Using a webinterface for docker

Portainer is an open-source container management tool that provides a web-based user interface for managing Docker environments. With Portainer, users can easily deploy and manage containers, images, networks, and volumes using a graphical user interface (GUI) instead of using the Docker CLI. Portainer also provides features for monitoring container and system metrics, creating and managing container templates, and configuring and managing Docker Swarm clusters.

Portainer is designed to be easy to use and to provide a simple and intuitive interface for managing Docker environments. It supports multiple Docker hosts and allows users to switch between them easily from the GUI. Portainer also provides role-based access control (RBAC) to manage user access and permissions, making it suitable for use in team environments.

Portainer can be installed as a Docker container and can be used to manage both local and remote Docker environments. It is available in two versions: Portainer CE (Community Edition) and Portainer Business. Portainer CE is free and open-source, while Portainer Business provides additional features and support for enterprise users.

Portainer is my tool of choice, as it allows to create stacks. A stack is a collection of Docker services that are deployed and managed as a single entity. A stack is defined in a Compose file (in YAML format) that specifies the services and their configurations.

When a stack is deployed, Portainer creates the required containers, networks, and volumes and starts the services in the stack. Portainer also monitors the stack and its services, providing status updates and alerts in case of issues or failures.

Export a Docker compose-file

As I said, its important for me to easily transfer a single container or stack to another server. The stack itself can be easily copied and reused. But do we easily export the setup of a current single docker file into a docker-compose file?

docker-autocompose to the rescue! This docker image allows you to generate a docker-compose yaml definition from a docker container.

Export single or multiple containers

Export all containers

This has been a great tool to also quickly backup all relevant container information. Apart from the persistent data, the most important information to quickly restore a setup if needed.

Backup , backup … backup! Learned my lesson, when it comes to restoring docker setups ;) Its so easy to forget little tweaks you did to the setup of a docker container.

Starting tomorrow …

Productivity tools are software applications that help individuals and teams to manage their time and tasks more effectively. These tools can range from simple time tracking and task management apps to more advanced project management software.

The goal of productivity tools is to increase efficiency, organization, and accountability, allowing users to accomplish more in less time. They can be used for a variety of purposes, such as scheduling meetings, setting reminders, tracking progress, and delegating tasks. With the right productivity tools, individuals and teams can streamline their workflows, increase their productivity, and achieve their goals more easily.

I always use the first week of the year to evaluate my tools, workflows and software. I try to switch as little as possible within every 6 months, as I can not afford any downtime during my projects. This is the first year, that I am sharing a mostly complete list of things I use. Might be interesting for some of you.

Update: Not completely done yet, but close :)

Project / Task Management & Research

1. Asana
   “Asana is a web and mobile application designed for team collaboration and project management. It allows users to organize tasks, projects, and conversations in one place, and it offers a range of features, such as the ability to assign tasks, set deadlines, and track progress. It is designed to help teams collaborate more efficiently and effectively. Asana is a freemium service, with paid plans that offer additional features and integrations.”
   
   Asana has been my go-to tool for the past years to organise my internal and client projects.
   Helps to keep me and my clients informed about upcoming tasks and tasks closed. Also enjoying the REST-API, as it allows me to connect to many of my other tools.
   
   I had a couple of clients that were skeptical about it, but many use it for themselves as well now.
2. Kimai – Time Tracking
   Kimai is an open-source time-tracking software. It is a web-based application that allows users to track and organise their time, and to generate reports on their activity.
   
   Kimai has been one of the first things, that I setup on my Homelab Server. Will talk more about my Homelab setup later …
   
   Its always difficult to grasp how much time projects take, especially when you are not doing generic projects.
   
   Kimai helped me to track certain tasks over the years and help me to optimise my internal hourly requirements per task and costs per task / milestone in the end. Nothing will ever make time-tracking and cost calculation rock solid, but it helps to at least lessen some of the pain ;)
   
   I also used to testdrive ActivityWatch, which has automatic watchers for different tools you use. Nice, but too involved for me.
   
   Kimai has a REST-API to easily access data from other tools in my stack. I have a tightly knit set of tools for all my workflows.
   
   Some of the features of Kimai include:
   
   • Time tracking, with the ability to start and stop timers, and to manually enter time worked
   • Support for multiple projects and tasks
   • Reporting, with the ability to generate various types of reports, including a detailed project report
   • Invoicing, for billing clients for the time worked on their projects
   • User management and permissions, allowing for multiple users and different levels of access to the application
   • Multi language support
   • Integration with other tools as invoicing, project management, and more.
     
     
3. Devonthink
   is a personal information management and research application for macOS, iPadOS and Windows. It helps individuals and teams to organize, classify and discover their files, bookmarks, emails, notes and more. It uses machine learning, natural language processing, and other advanced technologies to help users find and organize the information they need, and provides powerful tools for researching, writing, and data management.
   
   Additionally, DEVONthink provides integration with other applications such as TextExpander, and Hazel, feature for file encryption, backup, and syncing. It can also be used to store and organize PDFs, images, and other documents, and it can be used to create and manage databases, to-do lists, and other types of information.

Project Development Tools

IDE

1. Adobe Dreamweaver
   I know :) Tried to switch multiple times and always came back to it. I know where everything is and have not been asking for anything more in the past ;) But I am also trying to slowly phase out my Adobe subscription and switch to comparable tools without a subscription model!
   I used PHPStorm for a while, but never really switched completely. Not a big fan of the underlying Java architecture.
2. Nova
   CSS, Diff, EJS, ERB, HTML, INI, JavaScript, JSON, JSX, Less, Lua, Markdown, Perl, PHP, Python, Regex, Ruby, Sass, SCSS, Shell Script, SQL, Tree-sitter Query, TSX, TypeScript, XML, and YAML.
   
   Trying Nova right now, which might be my next IDE!

PROJECT PROTOTYPING

Pretty flexible, when it comes to these tools. I am working with different agencies and customers, some prefer Adobe XD and some Figma.

1. Adobe XD
   (Experience Design) is a user experience design software developed and published by Adobe Systems. It is used for designing and prototyping user interfaces for mobile and web applications. It provides a set of tools for designing and prototyping user interfaces, including vector-based drawing tools, prototyping tools, and design resources such as pre-built UI elements, icons, and typefaces.
   
   Adobe XD has built-in support for creating responsive designs, by allowing designers to create multiple artboards of different sizes, layouts, and orientations, in order to visualize their designs across a variety of devices and screen sizes.
2. Figma
   Figma is a cloud-based interface design and prototyping tool that allows designers to create, collaborate on, and share user interface designs. It is focused on providing a real-time collaborative design experience, making it easy for multiple people to work on the same design at the same time.

MARKUP TOOLS

1. MarkText
   A simple and elegant open-source markdown editor that focused on speed and usability.

LOCAL TOOLS

I am a Mac and Linux guy. Windows only exists virtualised in my work environment ;)

1. Homebrew
   The Missing Package Manager for macOS (or Linux).
   Allows you to get almost anything to run locally. Quickly install Go, specific Python or PHP versions.
   Works perfectly on ARM by now. Still remember switching between ARM and x86 architecture / machines for some tools in the past.

CROSS PLATTFORM DEVELOPMENT

1. XOJO
   Not very mainstream, but has been in my toolbox for the past 20 years. Currently testdriving the Android Beta and developing an Android App with it. Has its limitation, but will allow to easily switch to iOS next.
   
   “Xojo (previously known as REALbasic) is a software development tool that allows developers to create cross-platform desktop, web, and mobile applications. It is a high-level programming language and integrated development environment (IDE) that provides an easy-to-use interface for creating applications for various platforms, including macOS, Windows, Linux, iOS, and the web. Xojo uses a drag-and-drop interface for creating user interfaces and provides a wide range of tools for developing, debugging, and deploying applications.”
2. IONIC
   Mostly internal concepts and prototypes. I know my way around it and keep myself uptodate.
   
   “Ionic is a free and open-source framework for building cross-platform mobile applications using web technologies such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It allows developers to use their web development skills to build apps for iOS, Android, and the web (progressive web apps) all with a single codebase.
   
   Ionic is built on top of Angular (a JavaScript framework for building web applications) and Apache Cordova (a platform for building native mobile apps using web technologies) and provides a set of pre-built UI components and tools for building mobile apps with a native-like feel. It also allows developers to use popular JavaScript libraries such as Angular, React, and Vue.js to build apps.
   
   Additionally, Ionic also provides a command-line interface(CLI) to help developers quickly start new projects, build and test their apps on devices and simulators, and deploy their apps to app stores.”
3. FlutterFlow
   Also looking at FlutterFlow currently for some quick prototyping.
   
   FlutterFlow is a website and app building platform that allows users to create mobile and web applications without writing code. It uses a drag-and-drop interface and a visual editor to make it easy for users to design and build their applications. With FlutterFlow, users can create custom layouts, add features like forms, galleries, and e-commerce functionality, and connect to external APIs and services. It also includes a set of pre-built templates and components that can be easily customized to fit the needs of the user. Additionally, it also provides hosting, analytics and can be integrated with Firebase for mobile app development.

BROWSER & APP TESTING

1. LamdaTest
   Lambdatest is a cloud-based, cross-browser testing platform that allows users to test their web applications across a wide range of browsers, operating systems, and devices. It is designed to make it easy for developers and testers to run automated and manual tests on a scalable, pay-as-you-go infrastructure. The platform uses real browsers and virtual machines to simulate different environments, and it can also be integrated with popular testing frameworks and Continuous Integration (CI) tools.

API TESTING

1. RapidAPI (former Paw)
   RapidAPI for Mac is a full-featured HTTP client that lets you test and describe the APIs you build or consume. It has a beautiful native macOS interface to compose requests, inspect server responses, generate client code and export API definitions.

ERROR TRACKING

1. Glitchtip (Self hosted + Sentry compliant)
   An open-source error tracking software that helps developers identify and fix issues with their applications. It allows developers to monitor and detect errors in real-time and provides detailed information about the error, such as a stack trace, context, and user information.
   
   This information helps developers to quickly identify the root cause of an error and fix it. It can be integrated with various development platforms and languages such as python, java, javascript, c# and many more.
   
   Glitchtip provides a variety of features to help developers and teams manage errors, including:
   -Real-time notifications of new errors
   -Automated workflows to triage and assign errors
   -Support for grouping similar errors together for easy analysis
   
   This has been one of the biggest pains to setup myself in docker, but works like a charm now :)

TRANSLATION

1. PoEdit Mac App
   Poedit provides translators and developers with a powerful and intuitive editor for gettext. It helps save time on mundane translation tasks with a lightweight and easy-to-use interface and smart features like pre-translation and machine translation.
2. Weblate / Selfhosted in Docker
   “Web-based continuous localization. Hosted service and standalone tool with tight version control integration. Simple and clean user interface, propagation of translations across components, quality checks and automatic linking to source files.”

VERSIONING

1. BitBucket / SVN
   Use this for all my private repositories.
2. Github / Git
   Some public, some private repositories. These are mostly hobby related …
3. Homelab Git & SVN repositories
   Use this for projects, documents and other things I like to keep versioned

sFTP / SSH / TERMINAL

1. Transmit / sFtp
2. iTerm2 SSH & Terminal

COMPILER / BUNDLER

1. GULP
   “Leverage gulp and the flexibility of JavaScript to automate slow, repetitive workflows and compose them into efficient build pipelines.”
   
   This tool has been around for ages and is still my tool of choice for many tasks. I am keeping a preconfigured setup updated, so that I can easily reuse it when needed. There are some nice extensions available, like gulp notify, gulp fancy-log and vinyl-ftp.
   
   I started with Webpack for some projects, but some things are still a lot easier to handle with gulp. Currently also looking at PARCEL, which has gained traction and is well supported.
2. CodeKit
   Compile Sass, Less, Stylus, CSS, CoffeeScript, Pug, Slim, Haml, TypeScript, JavaScript, ES6, Markdown, JSON, SVG, PNG, GIF and JPEG right out of the box.
   
   Easy and fast to use, especially for smaller projects ;)

DATABASE

1. Navicat
   “Navicat Premium is a multi-connection database development tool which allows you to connect several types of databases within a single application: MySQL, MariaDB, MongoDB, SQL Server, SQLite, Oracle and PostgreSQL, create a quick and easy access to all your databases all at once.”

IMAGE PROCESSING / DESIGN

Again trying to free myself from the Adobe subscription model. Might be the last year and than I can finally transition away ;)

1. Affinity Photo
2. Adobe Photoshop

VECTOR DESIGN

Love to switch it up and again be flexible when it comes to customer preferences ;)

1. Sketch
   Love the eco-system around it. Artboards are quick to navigate and you can quickly export assets in the right format.
2. Affinity Designer
3. Adobe Illustrator

ANIMATION

1. Keyshape for 2D and Lottie Animations
   KeyShape is a vector animation software for Mac and Windows that allows designers and developers to create animations for the web, mobile apps and other platforms with a vector graphics editor. It’s an easy to use tool with a familiar design interface, that is built on top of industry standards such as SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) and CSS, making it easy to create animations that are lightweight, scalable and perform well on various devices.
   
   KeyShape was created with web designers and developers in mind, it is a great tool for creating animations that are optimized for the web and for adding interactive animations to mobile apps, It also allows for easy integration with other software and programming languages, like web development frameworks, it makes it a popular choice for adding interactive animations and effects to websites and apps.
2. Adobe Animate / After Effects

Project Communication

1. Slack
   Slack is designed to simplify and streamline communication within teams, making it easier for team members to share information, collaborate on projects, and stay on the same page. It can be used by small and big teams, for different purposes and industries, and it’s accessible via different devices and platforms.
   
   Used it far more in the past, but many of the things are centralised in Asana, other Homelab or external tools now. Still using Slack to centralize notifications.
   
   It’s a cloud-based platform that allows teams to communicate and work together in real-time, by providing a range of tools and features such as:
   • Instant messaging and chat, with support for direct messages and group conversations
   • Channels, which are dedicated chat rooms for specific topics, projects, or teams
   • File sharing, allowing users to easily share and collaborate on documents, images, and other files
   • Integrations, which allows Slack to connect with a wide variety of other tools and services, such as Google Drive, Trello, and Asana
   • Mobile apps, which allow users to stay connected and collaborate from anywhere
   • Search, that allows to look for previous conversations, files, etc.
   • Voice and video calls
     
     

Programming Languages

I am always staying busy, when it comes to programming languages. Have my side projects, that keep me exploring new stuff. My current top 8 ;)

1. PHP
2. Javascript / Node.JS / React Native
3. Ansible / Shell Scripting
4. Go / Golang
5. Python
6. Xojo (Realbasic) Desktop / Mobile / Console
7. Swift
8. C++

Homelab Tools

“A homelab is a personal laboratory or workspace that is set up in a person’s home, typically for the purpose of experimenting with and learning about various technology or IT related topics. This can include things like building and configuring servers, experimenting with different operating systems and software, and learning about network and security concepts.”

I started my Homelab 2020 to allow more flexible workflows, to play with Docker setups, lower costs for external services and have full access to any server tool when ever needed. Allows me to quickly mirror customer setups or simulate possible upgrade paths. Quite addictive once you start building your own server. And the things you learn, can be easily replicated to remote servers, which I just did last year. I am starting to move services from a long-time static server to a scalable docker based foundation.

Will follow up on this section soon ….

Enjoy coding ….

THE PREMISE

A fullstack developer is a software engineer who has expertise in all layers of a web application’s stack. This includes both the frontend, which is the user-facing part of the application, and the backend, which is the server-side portion of the application.

THE ROAD TO …

To become a fullstack developer, one must have a solid understanding of a wide range of technologies. This includes proficiency in at least one programming language, such as JavaScript or Python, as well as knowledge of databases, server infrastructure, and web development frameworks.

One of the key benefits of being a fullstack developer is that they can work on any part of a web application, from the design and user experience to the underlying server-side logic. This means that they can take on a wide range of roles and responsibilities, from designing the user interface to implementing complex business logic.

Fullstack developers are also in high demand, as the skills they possess are highly sought-after in the job market. This is because companies are increasingly looking for engineers who can work on both the frontend and backend of their web applications, rather than hiring separate teams for each layer of the stack.

In addition to their technical skills, fullstack developers must also have strong problem-solving and communication skills. This is because they often work on teams and need to be able to collaborate effectively with other developers, as well as communicate their ideas to non-technical stakeholders.

NEVER GETS BORING

Overall, being a fullstack developer is a challenging but rewarding career path. It requires a diverse set of skills and the ability to adapt to new technologies, but the rewards include the opportunity to work on a wide range of projects and the satisfaction of seeing your work come to life in the form of a web application.

Enjoy coding …

THE QUESTION

A while back a potential customer asked me, if it is possible to restructure a WordPress Multisite setup and WPML with a more simplified and custom url structure?

THE ROUGH IDEA

1 . BASE.website web.site (with possibly different languages)

web.site/de/
web.site/en/

2. SUB.website web.site/nl-nl/

Languages would normally be added like this:

web.site/nl-nl/de/
web.site/nl-nl/en/

The customer wanted it to be restructured / simplified like this:

web.site/de-nl/
web.site/en-nl/

This basically mimics the structure of a single WPML website with custom languages, but with all the benefits of a multisite.

THE SOLUTION

This is nothing that WPML or WordPress Multisite provides out of the box.
I built a prototype setup to make it work.

Not something that I would propose for anyone, as it requires a lot of tweaks for anything that handles dynamic links (plugins, hooks, core systems, page.builder …)

Its doable :)

BASIC URL HANDLING

One thing that needs to be tweaked globally, is the mapping of the new url structure.

So web.site/nl-nl/en/ needs to become web.site/en-nl/

This needs to be handled on the server side, by proxying the original to the new structure.
This can be easily done using Apache or NGINX.

With that web.site/nl-nl/en/ will be proxied to web.site/en-nl/, but any core navigation will not work yet.

This is the fastest solution that I came up with, within the hour I gave myself ;)

There surely are other options, like the core rewrites / restructuring of the core shorturl handling. But these approaches might break things in far more areas.

Using the proxy approach, keeps the core as it is. The solution needs to be as simple as possible, allowing to maintain it in the future :)

HOOKS TO THE RESCUE

Just for the basic setup a couple of hooks are required to make this work, more might be needed depending on the plugins in use.

Here a couple of examples ….
WordPress site_url

WordPress Nav Links

WPML

Rankmath

This will not cover every angle, but will give you a starting point! I love my puzzles and there always is a viable solution :)

Need something similar … get in touch!

Happy coding …

INTRODUCTION

This is not a tutorial, but more like sharing a nice geeky road-trip ;)

I have a pretty good understanding of the Youtube Data API, as I have actively used it on portalZINE TV in the past, to upload videos and dynamically link them to my local post-types.

For one of my latest customer projects (TYPEMYKNIFE / typemyknife.com), the task was a bit more complicated and the goal was to make it as future-proof as it can be with the Google APIs :)

Prerequisites / References to get you started:

• Youtube Data API Documentation
• Google Cloud Console
• OAuth 2.0 Playground / Generating a refresh token for Youtube API calls (a bit old, but close enough)
• Google API SDK / Composer
• OAuth 2 Simplified / Getting Started with OAuth 2.0

THE GOALS

The goal for the setup was to actively synchronize WooCommerce products with linked / attached videos, with their source at Youtube.

As the website is multilingual, WPML integration is critical as well. And as Youtube allows localization of title and description, that can be added into the mix quiet easily in the future ;)

The following product attributes should be mirrored and optimised for Youtube:

• Product Title
• Product Description (5000 character limit at Youtube)
  My customer already has a pretty long and detailed description, which is perfect for Youtube!
  We average around 2900-3000 characters.
• Product Tags (500 character length limit at Youtube)

The following attributes should be integrated into the description to enrich the Youtube description:

• Introduction
• Product Link to WooCommerce Product / Shop
• Socials
• Legal Information
• Hash Tags (local post-type to add recurring / important hash tags)
• Outro

All of these attributes will be collected internally and assigned using a simple template system, which allows the customer to move parts around freely and freely layout the description for Youtube.

The following stats will be collected for review:

• Products without a video linked (no relation)
• Products with the same video linked (duplication)
• Videos without a product in the system
• Total amount of videos / amount of video-pages (50 videos max per page)
• Total amount of products with videos

Youtube SEO

These are the relevant key aspects, that help to get your videos more views.

• Relevant text featuring at least 1,000 characters
• Keywords that are relevant on Google Search and YouTube and describe your video
• Hashtags, can also be used within the text
• Timestamps Links to related content / affiliate links

PREPARING AUTH / OAUTH2 AT GOOGLE

In the past access to the Youtube Data API was far easier and less limited, when it comes to offline / none expiring OAuth2 refresh tokens.

When you are building a server-side application that is only available to your customer or moderators, it makes no sense to run that app through the Google App verification. Your app will never be used in public.

The Youtube Data API and its scopes, are defined as sensitive and therefor require third-party security assessment for public access.

The scopes I am requesting are https://www.googleapis.com/auth/youtube.upload + https://www.googleapis.com/auth/youtube.

Because of that its far easier to just setup OAuth 2 in test mode and restrict access to your customer and specific additional accounts only (up to 100 test users allowed). What all these account need, is access to your own or Brand Youtube Channel.

Preparation in the Google Cloud Console:

• Activate Youtube Data API
• Create OAuth2 Client ID
  • Name
  • Allowed Redirects
• Setup OAuth-Consent Screen
  • Name of the App
  • Support Email
  • Logo
  • Allowed Domains
  • Typ: External
  • Setup all test-users, all of these need access to your Youtube channel already

A detailed description can be found here.

You can circumvent verification for the consent screen, by using an organisation setup at Google. Here some infos about that. With that setup offline refresh tokens should work fine.

Update: Just tried that, but wont work with a branded youtube account, even though the cloud user has admin access to it. Not giving up yet, but Google / Youtube really makes it difficult to just have a simple offline solution for specific tasks ;) BTW also forced the login hint, to make sure the right account is logged in : $client->setLoginHint(‘YourWoreksapceAccount’); !

You might have heard of the “The League of Extraordinary Packages“. It is a group of developers who have banded together to build solid, well tested PHP packages using modern coding standards.

They also offer an OAuth2-client + OAuth2 Google extension that can be used.

SERVER SETUP

On the server, the Google API PHP SDK can be easily integrated using Composer.

In my customer plugin I neatly separated all relevant areas in classes & traits:

• Online Authentification, with a 60 minute session
• Offline Authentification, with a 1 week expiration (might explain that in more detail in the future.)
• Error handling and debug information
• Listing of videos
• Updating of videos
• Updating of tags
• Updating hashtags
• Backup old data locally, before update. There should always be an option to restore, especially with 500 videos :)
• Settings & templates
• REST routes / endpoints

You can check the expiry time of your access token by accessing:
https://www.googleapis.com/oauth2/v1/tokeninfo?access_token=YOUR_TOKEN

“A Google Cloud Platform project with an OAuth consent screen configured for an external user type and a publishing status of “Testing” is issued a refresh token expiring in 7 days.” – Google

Basic Auth example from the SDK:

A simple upload example can be found here .

UPDATING A SINGLE VIDEO
BULK VIDEO UPDATES

All operations to and from the Youtube Data API are rate limited. What is important for us, are the queries per day.

The default quota is 10.000 queries per day, sounds a lot, but is easily gone after updating 150-200 videos. You can request this limit to be raised, but again a lot of paperwork and questions that are just not needed.

The above limit just means, that you need to cache as many queries as possible, to only query live when needed ;)

Something you learn fast, when experimenting with different things! I hit that limit multiple times in the first few days, with around 500 videos in the queue.

Different operation cost you different amount of units

• A read operation that retrieves a list of resources — channels, videos, playlists — usually costs 1 unit.
• A write operation that creates, updates, or deletes a resource usually costs 50 units.
  10.000 / 50 are 200 updates per day :)
• A search request costs 100 units.
• A video upload costs 1600 units. Glad we are not handling the upload as well, but technically easy ;)

It also helps to use the Google Developer Playground to testdrive the Youtube Data API with your own credentials while optimising your own code.
You can define your own OAuth 2.0 configuration by clicking the cog in the upper right corner.

I setup the bulk updating to allow splitting it over multiple days, if required. For this an offline refresh token is needed, as the standard token expires after 60 minutes.

My customer can also just update a single video, when changes are applied to the product or a new product has been added.

If more frequent updates are required, I will ask for a raise of the queries per day. You can circumvent the limit by using multiple Google Cloud Platform accounts with new OAuth credentials, but really an overkill right now. I have done that in the past ;)

LAYOUT & DESIGN

The GUI is just based of Bootstrap, to make it simple and clean. Using my own wrapper to make it work within the WordPress admin.

For all ajax operations, I am using htmx and _hyperscript, which I will talk about in another article in the future.

Really neat and clean way to build single page interfaces.

The whole plugin runs of its own REST API endpoint. Just love using WordPress as a headless system.

I used TWIG / Timber for the templates, to separate logic and layout. Timber has been my goto solution for years now. It drives my own and many customer websites.

CONCLUSION

This has been a lot of fun, maybe a bit too much LOL

I do geek-out about many of my projects, but this experience helped me to bring my WordPress toolbox to the next level. This will help to drive other things in the future.

Working so deeply with the Youtube Data API has been fun and feels so easy now, after all remaining problems have been solved.

Would have loved this during my portalZINE TV days ;)

I you read all this, you just earned yourself a badge for completion ;)

Need something similar or something else? Just say hi and we can talk.

ENJOY CODING ….