Need to create a WordPress video gallery on your site? WordPress gives you a built-in tool to display image galleries, but WordPress isn’t quite as generous when it comes to creating video galleries.
While there is technically a core function to create a video “playlist”, it only works with videos that you host on your own server. But because hosting videos on your own server is generally a pretty horrible idea, that functionality isn’t very useful in most situations.
Instead, if you’re like most people, you’re probably embedding videos from a third-party service like YouTube, Vimeo, or Wistia. And that might leave you wondering, “how can I create a WordPress video gallery from external videos that I’m embedding on my site?”
In this post, I’ll share some real use cases for these types of video galleries. Then, I’ll give you a quick tutorial on how you can actually get up and running with your own flexible WordPress video gallery using the Posts Table Pro plugin from Barn2 Media.
While I’ll focus on embedding external videos in this gallery, the method that I show you will still work just fine even if you’re hosting your own videos.
Here Are Some Examples Of Use Cases For Video Galleries
While you can probably think up plenty of creative uses outside of this list, some of the most common ways to use a WordPress video gallery are…
A Video Portfolio
If you make videos for a living, that’s a pretty good reason to want to showcase your work. But there are plenty of other professions that might be better off with a video gallery portfolio as well.
An Updated Feed Of Your Latest Content
If you make YouTube videos for a living, you can create an automatically updated gallery of your latest content using a combination of the method that I’ll discuss in this post plus WP RSS Aggregator.
That way, you can bring in all of your YouTube videos to your site automatically and display them exactly how you prefer.
A Playlist Of Videos
Whether they’re your own videos or you just want to create a playlist from other people’s videos, a video gallery gives you the power to display the exact information that you want and put the videos in a specific order.
A Video Sharing Site
If you have a video sharing site, a video gallery lets you do cool things like:
- Display the latest videos in one spot
- Showcase featured videos in one spot
You can then even direct your users back to the full post that contains that video.
How To Create A WordPress Video Gallery With Posts Table Pro
While some regular WordPress gallery plugins let you include videos, the Posts Table Pro plugin is actually a great option to create WordPress video galleries because:
- It gives you exact control over what information you display (or don’t display)
- Your visitors will be able to sort your videos by tags, categories, or even search for keywords
- You can automatically update your videos based on an RSS feed (in conjunction with a plugin like WP RSS Aggregator)
Basically, most of the pre-made WordPress gallery plugins are fairly one-size-fits-all, while Posts Table Pro is going to give you a lot more control over how you display things.
In order to get that flexibility, you’ll need to perform a tiny bit of prep work. But I think that prep work is worth the extra control.
Basically, Posts Table Pro works by displaying…a table of your posts (makes sense given the name, right?). So to create a WordPress video gallery, you’ll first need to add each video to a post.
Rather than storing videos in regular WordPress posts, which would get in the way of your blog, I recommend creating a Video custom post type instead. That might sound daunting, but I promise you that it will only take you about a minute to do it. Trust me!
Step 1: Create Video Custom Post Type
There are a bunch of plugins that can help you create a custom post type from your WordPress dashboard. I’ll show you using Custom Post Type UI because it’s super simple, but Pods is another great option.
Once you’ve installed and activated Custom Post Type UI, go to CPT UI → Add/Edit Post Types.
Enter:
- Post Type Slug – video
- Plural Label – videos
- Singular Label – video
And then click Add Post Type:
Bam! That’s it – you just created a custom post type. I told you it was easy, right?
Now, you can access your new video custom post type by clicking on the Videos option in your WordPress dashboard:
Step 2: Add Videos To Your Site
Next, you need to add the videos that you want to display by going to Videos → Add New. It should look exactly like the regular WordPress editor.
Enter:
- The video’s title in the Title box
- The video embed code in the body of the post (you can also embed your own self-hosted videos here, if desired)
Then Publish your video.
If you want to create multiple video galleries and/or allow your readers to sort by categories/tags, you might also want to create a custom taxonomy. A custom taxonomy is exactly like regular WordPress categories or tags, only you can assign it to your new video custom post type.
If you want to do this:
- Go to CPT UI → Add/Edit Taxonomies
- Fill in the basic information just like you did for your custom post type
- Under Attach to Post Type, make sure to check the box for Videos
Then, you’ll be able to assign tags to your video in the WordPress editor:
Step 2.b: Automatically Import Videos With WP RSS Aggregator
This part is optional – but if you want to automatically import the videos in your gallery (say, to display a feed of the latest videos at your YouTube channel), then you can use WP RSS Aggregator’s Feed To Post add-on to automatically import content from an RSS feed to your video custom post type.
This post will show you how to import RSS feeds as posts on your site.
To get even more creative, you can even use MondoPlayer to automatically curate other people’s videos.
Step 3: Display Video Gallery Using Posts Table Pro
At this point, you should have a list of videos that looks something like this:
Now, all that’s left to do is use Posts Table Pro to actually display those videos on your frontend site in a nice gallery.
Once you’ve installed and activated the Posts Table Pro plugin, you’ll do this using a shortcode and various shortcode parameters.
The basic shortcode looks like this:
[posts_table]
But to actually make it display the gallery, you’ll need to add some modifying parameters. Some of the things that you can do with parameters are:
- Add drop-downs so that visitors can filter/sort by categories or tags
- Add an AJAX search box so that visitors can search your gallery without a page reload
- Control exactly what information displays in each column. For example, maybe you want to display the date a video was added or a description of the video.
For a more detailed explanation of all the options available to you, I recommend that you check out the developer’s post on using the plugin for a video gallery, as well as the full list of shortcode parameters.
I’m going to skip straight to the point though and show you my finished product:
[posts_table post_type="video"shortcodes="true"columns="content:Watch Now,title,excerpt:Description,tax:video_category"widths="40,15,30,15"]
That shortcode generates the video gallery that I showed you at the beginning of the post:
If you’re wondering where the description text comes from, I activated the Excerpt box in the Custom Post Type UI settings and then added an excerpt to each video post.
You don’t have to follow my layout, though! The nice thing about the plugin is that you can actually customize your gallery to make it exactly your own.
Final Thoughts On Building A WordPress Video Gallery
If you just want to throw up a basic WordPress video gallery and are fine with accepting a plugin’s one-size-fits-all design, this method might be a bit overkill.
But if you want to create a video gallery that you have full control of, setting it up like this is going to give you pinpoint control over how everything looks and functions.
Have any other questions about how to create a WordPress video gallery with Posts Table Pro? Leave a comment and we’ll try to help out.
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