YouTube changed RSS feeds… now Shashin doesn't work
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All right, I just saw that this plugin is not being actively supported any more, which is a pity, since I happen to love it 🙂 But I saw a recent update the other day, so I’m still hopeful that someone has a fix for this…
YouTube (and Google in general) is changing the way their RSS feeds work. The ‘old’ way of grabbing a YouTube feed doesn’t work any longer, since YouTube migrated from its v2 API to the v3 API (which needs a key).
There is still a workaround. Old RSS feeds (in XML) can still be gathered with URLs like https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?user=USERNAME, for instance.
However, this has a few limitations. First, you’re limited to the amount of API calls you can do per day. I haven’t checked if Shashin calls this every time the page is loaded, or if it is just cached once an admin reloads the URL. If so, that would work nicely.
Secondly, some reports show that only the last 15 videos (as opposed to the last 50, which is hard-coded in Shashin) are shown. This can be a limitation for some, or not.
And last but not least, which will require some extensive coding, YouTube only offers the RSS feed in XML. I’ve been looking through the Shashin code and it always expects JSON feeds. Bummer!
It’s possible to convert an XML feed to a JSON feed (not perfect, but it should work). The problem here is that Shashin is very modular, but assumes that all feeds are JSON feeds. This would require dealing with an exception at the ShashinSynchronizer class — dealing with JSON for Picasa/Twitpic but with XML for YouTube. I tried to see if I could change the Admin_ShashinSynchronizerYoutube class to grab XML instead of JSON, but it’s pretty much impossible: the parent class really assumes that the feed is in JSON.
The alternative, of course, would be to use the YouTube v3 API, which allegedly still provides JSON feeds as before. Shashin would just need to have somewhere a place to allow users to input their Google API key. And, of course, there is a bit more work involved due to the authentication. Again, I have no idea how hard this development would be, but it seems tricky: https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/code_samples/php
So, unless there is a major rewriting of the Shashin code, this means that YouTube videos are out for now.
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