my Video Poster

Clever Plugins is a new professional WordPress software house by well known WordPress guru Lars Koudal of myWordPress.com.

Their latest release is my Video Poster which automates posting videos to your WordPress blog; which lends itself perfectly if you want a steady set of Youtube videos posted to your regular blog or if you want to set up an entire blog dedicated to videos.

my Video Poster (MVP) Features

Video posting

Post videos from an unlimited number of Youtube feeds; individual accounts, niche markets (comedy, movie trailers etc) or any of the several default Youtube feeds featuring their most popular videos to the most commented on etc.

These feeds will be randomly rotated when posting (either manually or automatically) and you have the option (highly suggested) to check if video allows for external embedding and if not, skip that video and go to the next one. This will prevent stale posts of unembeddible videos!

You define how often you want MVP to post new videos and how many each time (x videos every y minutes); this way, you have full control of the amount of automated videos added to your web site.

If you are running a video site, you might want to have a long list of RSS feeds to pull from and post maybe 5-10 posts every 30 or 60 minutes, on the flip-side; if you have a niche site, you might want to post one or two a day just to keep your site fresh with new content. It is up entirely to you.

When a video is posted it will automatically optimize the title for better Search Engine Optimization (SEO); import comments (optionally) from the Youtube video page and add tags (optionally) related to the video.

If you opted to add comments from the Youtube video page, those comments are checked for moderation via WordPress so you can automatically weed out those four letter words that most webmasters don’t want to appear on their sites.

in order to do this; you need to uncheck the comment author must have a previously approved comment in the WordPress settings, or they will all be put into moderation. my Video Poster will automatically check to see if option is checked or unchecked and will warn you as needed.

When a post is published, MVP will trigger post hooks, such as pinging, XML Sitemap creations etc. depending on what plugins are installed.

Video Embedding and Thumbnails

MVP will work with just about any WordPress theme, it allows you to embed the video directly into the post, or if your theme uses custom fields to add videos; MVP gives you the choice to pick what works with your theme.

Not only does it embed the video into the post or into a custom field, it will also grab the videos thumbnail (the large kind (320×240 pixels)) and it gives you the option to embed the thumbnail in the post or into a custom field; again, giving you the choice with what works with your theme.

It gets better than that; the thumbnail is not hot linked from Youtube (which is against their TOS), it actually downloads the thumbnail to your WordPress installation.

Additional Settings

Other options that you have in the settings are:

• Choose which user to post as
• Choose what category to post in – allowing you to set up a video only category
• Define video size (I use 560×340 pixels as that fits perfectly in the themes I use)
• Choose post status (Publish or Draft) – giving you the option to manually tweak each post before actually going live.

Screenshots

Plugin Review

That should give you an idea of what my Video Poster is capable of; now for the actual review; and I want to add a disclosure: I have been part of beta testing my Video Poster since its conception; however, this relationship with Clever Plugins does not affect this review.

I have used my Video Poster on several different web sites that I run; both to add that occasional fresh content related to the niche site and to the other extreme; running a Youtube video site which I used to update manually whenever (which was more never than ever).

In both scenarios; MVP has performed perfectly, once you have set it up according to how you want it (embed videos or thumbnails into the post or use custom fields and how often and how many videos to post are the main things) – your only thing to do is basically making sure that the RSS feeds that you use do not run out of videos to post.

If you use Youtube’s auto-updating (latest, most viewed, etc. or niche category) RSS feeds, you need not worry, those are updated constantly. However, if you decide to add specific user feeds; they might run out after a while if they are not updated often enough.

The solution? Add more RSS feeds, allowing MVP more to chew on and your site will never run out of fresh content.

You can check out one of my sites Different Videos – it is automatically adding new videos every hour; automatically, bringing new visitors to my site without my having to do much of anything. It is good for me, for my visitors and for the search engines that constantly gets new material to grab.

Another thing I really like about MVP is that this is not a black hat scraping script, it basically does what you would do manually for you – and the video posts look like a human posted video post.

There are a couple of things that I would like to see MVP add in the future such as the ability to post each feed into different categories; as it stands right now, all feeds go into the same category.

The other thing I would like to see updated, would be the ability to use smaller increments in posting intervals (currently, this is set in 30 minute increments) so if you want to post four videos every hour, you could post 4 videos every 60 minutes or 2 videos every 30 minutes; where as it would be more intuitive to post one video every 15 minutes.

Currently, my Video Poster only supports Youtube videos; to me, personally, that’s inconsequential as Youtube is my video site of choice – so I just wanted to point that out.

These are clearly nitpicking issues that I know that Clever Plugins will change in upcoming versions; I find this plugin very useful whenever you have a site that could be spruced up by some targeted videos and best of all, is that when you purchase my Video Poster, you are allowed to use it on all of your sites, one license fits all; and it is affordable with it’s introduction price of only $40usd.

For more information and to purchase go to Clever Plugins.

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