User blog:Xean/New ways to showcase Video

Back in September we announced that we are working hard to offer and integrate more videos into Wikia. Having videos on your wiki is a nice way to highlight content and give people the chance to really experience your wiki's topic. There are a couple of interesting ways we've been working on to display videos, and we wanted to share them with you.

Main Pages
We wanted to be able to show more than one video on a main page without taking up too much space, so we started experimenting with a randomizer. This code lets you feature 1 main video, with 3 smaller videos displayed below. When the page is refreshed, the 3 smaller videos are also refreshed, offering 3 new and interesting videos.

Check it out in action below, and find the code for doing it yourself here.



Linking to more videos
We often put videos on our blog posts, and we wanted to give people a way to access all the available videos relating to their interest. To do this, we created footer templates that can either link to the video wiki or point directly at search results for a specific topic in the Wikia Video Library.

To point to the video wiki, you can use this generic Video Footer:

Simply use the template code on your wiki and the template above will be displayed.

If you would like to point directly to search results for your topic, you can use a customized template. You can see an example of the customized footer on the Pirates of the Caribbean wiki here: http://pirates.wikia.com/wiki/Template:VideoFooter

This is a great way to link to the latest video content we have for your topic. You can learn more about both of these templates on the video wiki.

Got ideas?
Do you have an idea for how to add more videos to your wiki in an interesting way? Maybe into an infobox or on an episode page? Please share ideas below (and don't forget to stop by the Wikia Video Library). If you need any help with the code we shared here, just let us know below!