Will TopBox allow playlists?

Now that everyone and their pet cat has a YouTube channel, I’d like to know if TopBox can automatically pull in playlists. I believe Vimeo paid subscribers can also create playlists, so that would be helpful as well.

Yes - in a round about way :wink:

The newly released ProGallery stack has a new content source called YouTube Playlist. It does as the name suggests, in that it uses the official YouTube API to pull any public playlist and video content into your website.

Like this:
https://twitter.com/willwoodgate/status/1325933884979245059

The video thumbnails are used in the grid as static thumbnail images to click. Clicking on a thumbnail reveals the video within a lightbox, ready to play.

ProGallery includes several new lightbox types, including a “light” version of TopBox. So this solution gives you an instant method towards building a video gallery, from YouTube content. With the advantage that as your edit the playlist on YouTube, your website updates to reflect the video being added or removed. Perfect for vloggers or anybody else with a keen interest in YouTube integration on a website. It was actually made and tested with the help of a vlogger.

The YouTube API sounds scary to setup. I have tried my best to document it really clearly. In reality, it is not too difficult for anyone to get working. I am using the official YouTube API, so it is not really something YouTube can take away from you (without some prior warning)! Definitely more stable than other unofficial methods of “scraping” data from YouTube.

I am aware that the standalone version of TopBox (outside of ProGallery) has a lot more extra settings. In particular, you can change the style of the video controls to something more custom. Whereas the “light” version of TopBox bundled in ProGallery only has the basic settings.

Thankfully TopBox and ProGallery can “talk” to each other. I have already documented this a little on the ProGallery product page. What you can do is to disable the normal lightboxes in ProGallery. Add a regular (full) TopBox stack to your webpage and configure it to lightbox the ProGallery thumbnails. It has been tested and it works flawlessly. So if this is something you think you might want help setting up, let me know. I can email you a sample project file to play with.

ProGallery can do individual Vimeo videos you add one-by-one, but not entire playlists. If there was interest from yourself or others to have a Vimeo Playlist source added in a future free update, then I can consider it.

Initially when I looked a few weeks ago, there wasn’t a whole lot of information about the Vimeo API and some of it seemed outdated or dependant on having paid accounts. So that’s why Vimeo playlists haven’t been included in ProGallery currently. However the architecture of the stack would definitely support more image and video sources being added.

I find the biggest hurdle is often finding good, reliable APIs to use for fetching data. Not all content providers are so keen on people reusing content in third party websites.

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