YouTube Connector for Tridion Sites

Some of our customers have been asking about our YouTube Connector for Tridion Sites, so I'd like post some instructions on how to download and use it. Mind you, it's not an officially supported connector, but quite honestly it's so straightforward that there's not a whole lot to support :). If you do run into problems, just hop on over to the forums to get some help from the community.

From a functional standpoint, when you add the YouTube Connector via the Add-On Manager, your channels will become available so that content authors can easily browse the channels and add videos as part of a Component.

To get started, there are a just a few quick steps. It should take less than 10 minutes.

  1. Download the zip file and unpack it. You'll find the JSON configuration file and the connector zip file.
  2. Open up the JSON configuration file and make the following changes.
    1. Change the apiKey to your YouTube. Instructions to do so are available at https://developers.google.com/youtube/registering_an_application. And yes there is a YouTube video explaining the process :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuM7KH-JLu8
    2. Get the Channel IDs that you want to use. This is different than the Channel Name. To do this:
      1. Go to YouTube and sign in.
      2. Click on your icon in the upper right and at the bottom click on Settings
      3. In the "Your YouTube channel" section click on "View advanced settings"
      4. Now copy this Channel ID and paste it into the channels section of the JSON file. Repeat these steps for any other channels that you have.
    3. The final configuration that you need to do is to set up a Stub Folder. What exactly is a stub folder? The easiest way to think of it is a virtual folder that points to a set of outside resources. The interesting thing about it is that you can use Tridion's inheritance model to determine if you want to have the connectors available to all publications by putting it high up in the BluePrint hierarchy or by putting lower down for only a few publications. So create your folder and copy the folder's magical TCM ID - it will look something like tcm:2-167-2. Update the JSON file with this information, save and for the configuration part, you are DONE!

So now let's head over to the Add-On Manager where you will upload the connector. After uploading the zip file, you will need to upload the configuration JSON file that you modified. At this stage you'll see that that the connector is awaiting activation. Simply browse over to Experience Space (or the Content Explorer and it will activate.

Happy YouTubing!

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