Videos

There is a sidebar widget for the Structure theme that will allow you to easily add videos.

There are two ways you can add videos to your sidebar: by post or by inputting an embed URL.

First, add the widget to your sidebar. If you want to just add any video to your sidebar without posting, follow the steps below to get the embed URL and paste it in the section provided in the widget panel.

If you want to show your latest video post, select a category or tag that you’d like your video post to come from (category setting overrides the tag setting). Then, you’ll have to write a post.

Getting the video embed URL

I’ve tested it with YouTube, Google Video, MetaCafe, and Vimeo. This example is from YouTube since it’s the most popular of the video sites.

• Find the video that you want and copy the embed code.
• YouTube example: Here’s an example video I have on YouTube.

The embed code is:

<object width="425" height="355">
<param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/FE_XpRmtcJw&rel=1"></param>
<param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param>
<embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/FE_XpRmtcJw&rel=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="355">
</embed>
</object>

We need to strip that down to the simplest thing — the URL.

http://www.youtube.com/v/FE_XpRmtcJw&rel=1

Remove the “&rel=1” from the end because we won’t need that. Your URL should now look like:

http://www.youtube.com/v/FE_XpRmtcJw

That’s all you need to do to get the embed URL

Creating video posts

This part of the tutorial assumes you already have the embed URL of the video.

Create a custom field Key named Video (it must be capitalized - case-sensitive). In the Value field, add the URL http://www.youtube.com/v/FE_XpRmtcJw.

You can nnow write your post. If you’ve chosen a category or tag for your video widget, then you need to add the post to that category or tag.