YouTube Thumbnailer

I have received a request from someone that wants even more from my WordPress Custom Fields Plugin. He has a category called “videos” which has posts with YouTube videos embedded with some plugin. He wants to put the videos thumbnail as the post’s thumbnail.

First, how is the video embedded in the post? It uses the following syntax:

Now you can embed it like you would normally do.

Second, how do we get the thumbnail itself after we extracted the video key? We build the image’s URL with the following syntax:
http://i2.ytimg.com/vi/$video_key/default.jpg

Now, how do we put all of this together into a plugin that inserts the thumbnails?
You don’t have to because I have already done it for you.

• Visit the plugin page of YouTube Thumbnailer
• Download the plugin here
• Unzip it’s contents
• Upload the folder you unzipped to /wp-content/plugins/ using your favorite FTP client.
• Go to your admin panel and activate the plugin called “Youtube Thumbnailer”

This plugin runs through the posts in your blog and if it finds a YouTube video embedded in a post it sets the thumbnail to be the video’s thumbnail.
That’s it, have fun playing with the configuration.

If you encounter any issues please comment/contact me.