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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:

portalZINE NMN | Development meets Creativity | youtube data api

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
portalZINE NMN | Development meets Creativity | youtube data api auth

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 .

portalZINE NMN | Development meets Creativity | youtube data api list

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.

portalZINE NMN | Development meets Creativity | road ends

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 ….

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„Klaro [klɛro] is a simple consent management platform (CMP) and privacy tool that helps you to be transparent about the third-party applications on your website. It is designed to be extremely simple, intuitive and easy to use while allowing you to be compliant with all relevant regulations (notably GDPR and ePrivacy).“

The tool is developed by KIPROTECT and can be found on Github.

Black & White

As I integrated Klaro on a couple of websites so far, I decided to make my work a bit easier and start building some basic clean themes for it.

I have a basic white and black&white theme so far. The download includes a testdrive folder, to showcase the themes. The white theme is also used on this website ;)

I really hate those standard consent management modals, that integrate badly into the website native design.

Klaro does a good job allowing to override its core theme and makes it a bit more pleasant. We do have to live with those modals from now on ;)

The themes are Sass-based and provide easy configuration options.

Enjoy!

cubicFUSION Themes for Klaro! @ Github

Klaro! Tweaks

Klaro is still missing some things, will collect some workarounds here for you to play with.

Missing events for consent modal open / closed …

Updates: Github Discussion
– 0.7.10 also adds custom callbacks to services (onAccept, onDecline, onInit) NICE!

Used a simple MutationObserver to do some magic for now, without diving into the core Klaro code for now. I am sure they already have an event listener or watcher setup.

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What’s new / What changed ?

Admin Enhancer is the first free plugin released under the cubicFUSION brand. The plugin is still work in progress, but a tool that is already used within some of my client projects. I am using this  plugin to centralise things I love & need, when sending out a finished website or project.

NEW: DASHBOARD GUTENBERG / DASHBOARD TEMPLATES
NEW: ADMIN TOOLBAR
UPDATE: SHORTCODES

Addons included …

This version includes a new addon “GUTENBERG DASHBOARD“, that allows you to build a White-Label Admin Dashboards using the Gutenberg Editor.

It integrates with the SHORTCODES addon and allows to drop in the dashboard widgets via its own Gutenberg Block.

The Block provides settings to overwrite CSS from the admin widgets, allowing you tweak them a bit — for better visual integration. The Dashboard template itself can be tweaked using CSS and Sass via SCSS now 😉

I am also releasing the first integration of the “ADMIN TOOLBAR” addon, which allows you to tweak some of the admin toolbar and footer options (Hide WP Logo, Hide Toolbar on Frontend, Hide Menu Items ..)

Already working on 0.3 … ENJOY!

cubicFUSION – Admin Enhancer
WordPress Repository

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Together with my partners in crime (Dorit & Micha), we have finally opened our own personal online store.

We have been selling our single origin coffees (1st Single Malt Whisky Coffee, Basic – Single Origin Arabica, Kill me Quick Espresso -Single Origin Robusta), teas (Kräuterschorle – Kräutertee, Feuerkieker – Schwarztee) and rum (Fortune Teller – Double Aged Barbados Rum) using the Amazon Marketplace for the past 2 years.

No more Amazon

GreenApe has been a side project for the past years and I never wanted to deal with the maintenance of our own store. But its time to move on and do our own thing. Amazon has removed so many useful features over the years or added a new fee on top of other fees. Even though Amazon provides access to a large amount of customers, for small companies the fees build up quickly.

Our own

With our own store we can finally do bundles, coupons again and better optimized shipping. It will also allow me to better testdrive some new interesting features for my customers ;) Yeah its kind of my new toy or shopping lab! Its fun being able to work on untested new SEO features, structured data, merchant tools, shopping ads and tracking of all of those.

Locations

We have been selling in Germany for the past 2 years, but that might be changing in the future depending how well the new store shapes up :)

If you live in Germany, love good coffee, tee or rum … say Hi!

GreenApe – Makes Your Life Better
Homepage
Shop
Contact us

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A nice set of CSS3 Animations that can be easily used to spice up your design.

The animations can be triggered through Javascript, jQuery and the timings can be tweaked through pure CSS. The package also provides gulp, so that you can tweak every aspect easily.

Demo
Github

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  1. SPRITEOWL is a Photoshop extension that takes over the boring part of working with sprite images and CSS.
    Retrieves x, y, width and height info of all sprite elements
    Exports retina ready PNG files and required media queries of your Photoshop sprite file
    Supports preprocessors LESS, SASS/SCSS & Stylus
    Spriteowl
  2. CSSOWL is a mixin library that works with Spriteowl.
    LESS, SASS/SCSS & Stylus support
    Open source
    Cssowl

Two tools that can enhance your workflow immensely. Enjoy!

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Easily add beautiful checkboxes and radio buttons in pure CSS. Highly customizable via SCSS.

portalZINE NMN | Development meets Creativity | preview


  •  Basic
    • Shapes – SquareCurveRound
    • Variants – DefaultFillThick
    • Colors – PrimarySuccessInfoWarningDanger
    • Color types – SolidOutline
    • Animations – SmoothTadaJellyPulseRotate
  • Switch – iOS style – OutlineFillSlim
  • Responsive
  • No JavaScript
  • Custom Font Icons
  • SVG Icons
  • Image support
  • Toggle between icons / SVG’s / images
  • Lock
  • State – FocusHoverIndeterminate
  • Supports frameworks – BootstrapFoundationSematic UIBulma, …
  • SCSS customization
  • Supports all modern browsers, including mobile devices
  • Print friendly

GitHub

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A tiny requestAnimationFrame powered 60+fps lightweight parallax tilt effect for jQuery.

GitHub

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30. August 2017

GreenApe is breathing again

After some downtime, GreenApe is breathing again. I revived the brand with a good friend of mine and we will be reopening shop options shortly.

Michael and I have been friends for a long time. We have been working on many different projects over the years.

He launched GreenApe in 2011 and I helped him with his first steps. A couple of months ago we decided to merge our competences and expand what GreenApe offers and stands for.

From the website:The GreenApe brand was established in 2011. GreenApe’s career began with the 1st Single Malt Whisky Coffee.

As the first of its kind, our coffee is refined with Original Single Malt Whisky. To this day, he pampers many connoisseurs and gourmets with his unique taste. Now there is another reason to rejoice.

From now on, we are continuously expanding the GreenApe product world with several stylish gadgets and useful accessories. For you this means that you will be able to discover even more beautiful, special or practical things in the future.

GreenApe is all about lifestyle & leisure products, fun gadgets and unique food & drinks.
portalZINE NMN | Development meets Creativity | slogan

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Element queries are a new way of thinking about responsive web design where the responsive conditions apply to elements on the page instead of the width or height of the browser.
Unlike CSS @media queries, @element Queries are aware of more than just the width and height of the browser, you can write responsive conditions for a number of different situations like how many characters of text or child elements an element contains.
Another concept that element queries brings to CSS is the idea of ‘scoping’ your styles to one element in the same way that JavaScript functions define a new scope for the variables they contain.“

Element Query Conditions

Width-based Conditions

Height-based Conditions

Count-based Conditions

Scroll-based Conditions

Aspect-based Conditions

Meta-Selectors

Element Queries

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