I have been searching around lately for good plugins to add videos to WordPress as I am in the process of building a video section for WPLift. My search has brought me today to VideoRobot which is a premium plugin available on CodeCanyon for $35.

It has a lot of features for building a video website – you can import videos from YouTube in 5 different ways – By Playlist, By Channel, By Search, By Video ID, By Search or by Popular trending videos. It has some powerful auto-posting features so you can drip feed new videos to your site, I used to run an auto-posting plugin so I know these can be quite complex and tricky to get right.

In this post I will be taking a look at the plugin in depth and seeing how you set it up and import videos.

Download VideoRobot »

Plugin Installation

After you have uploaded and activated the plugin, you will see it has added a few new menu items – “Sources”, “Videos” and “WP Video Robot”. Your first port of call should be the “Sources” menu and “Add New Source” which is where you can define where the videos should come from. Click the “Add New Source” link and you can choose to add a video from :

Trends

Search

Playlists

Channels

Videos

Once you have chose a source, for example in the above screenshot I chose “Playlist” and pasted in the URL for a playlist from YouTube, you can choose the “Source Fetching Options” which allow you to choose the order, skip duplicates, include video stats and video tags.

You can then pick the “Source Posting Options” and choose to auto-publish or save as a pending post, choose a category to post to, choose an author for the post.

The final step is to mark the source as “Active”, Choose a posting schedule ( Hourly, Daily, Weekly or Once” and then hit “Publish” to save the source.

After you have published, you can click on “Test Source” to check that the plugin pulls the correct videos :

If the test looks ok, you can then click the “Run this Source” button and the videos will be added to your site, you can then view the added videos under the “Videos” menu link and you will see them listed with a screenshot, title etc and you can manually edit any video info by clicking on that video.

Plugin Options

Now you have seen how to setup a source and import some videos, you can visit the “WP Video Robot” menu and configure some more advanced options for your site. The first menu tab “WP Video Robot” is a stats screen with some nice graphics which show the number of videos added, number of sources, category, author and so on.

The “Manage Options” tab lets you set up some default options for the plugin such as time zone, enable manual video adding, YouTube API key and so on. There is a “Posting” tab to set the default number of videos to be imported, default order, default posting author etc which you can override when you are setting up a new source if you need something different.

The “Integration” tab allows you to choose whether to auto-include videos in posts ( you can also manually embed with a shortcode ), embed the video instead of a thumbnail etc

Finally you have the “Automation” tab where you can choose to use a CRON job to handle the automatic import of videos, rather than relying on WordPress to handle this.

A very useful addition to the plugin is an “Activity Log” so you can see any actions which happened on the site – this is handy for keeping track of what has been posted and troubleshoot any problems if they arise.

There is also an “Automation” Dashboard where you can see CRON status and Stress forecasts for your site so you don’t overload your hosting importing too many videos at once.

Conclusion

This is quite a powerful plugin with many options that you will need for auto-importing videos from YouTube into WordPress. These types of plugin with automated features can be a little tricky to setup but this plugin was quite easy to understand and start importing videos within a few minutes. If you get stuck, there is a very extensive documentation included and support links on the plugin pages.

The number of ways you can setup sources is very well though-out and will cover most eventualities – the playlist and channel feature is essential if you want to use your own YouTube channel to add your videos to WordPress and the automation feature is very handy to add a steady stream of new video content to your site.

The activity logs and Automation dashboard are great features so you can see exactly what is going with plugin – these are features not seen on a lot of automation plugins but can be essential to diagnose any problems.

At $35 this plugin is great value and should be able to handle all your video posting requirements.

Download VideoRobot »