Category: Updates

Hot on the heels of Video Hub 2.0, version 2.1 sharpens the part of the plugin you spend the most time with: building playlists in the block editor. You can now base a playlist on a video category, pick from all of your themes, and enjoy a clearer, smarter editing experience. Here’s the rundown.

Build a playlist from a category

The playlist block and the [cbc_playlist] shortcode can now pull every video from a category in your library — with the ordering and pagination you’d expect. Add new videos to that category and the playlist keeps itself up to date; there’s nothing to edit by hand.

This replaces the old “YouTube playlist ID” source, which only ever filtered videos you’d already imported and was easy to mistake for a live fetch. Categories are clearer, more predictable, and far more useful.

A clearer Source panel

We reworked the block’s Source panel so there’s never any guesswork about where your videos come from:

• One source at a time. Manual selection and category are now mutually exclusive — choosing one clears the other, so what you see in the editor is exactly what your visitors get on the front end.
• Know your source at a glance. When a category is selected, the panel tells you which category the videos are pulled from and how many it contains.
• Show them all. A new “Show all videos” toggle lets a category list every single video it holds, instead of capping the count.
• Reset in one click. Switch back to hand-picked videos whenever you like with a single “Reset source” button.

Every theme, right in the block

The block’s Theme selector now lists all of your registered playlist themes — including Grid, Cinema and Minimal, and any theme you add later. No more being limited to a handful of options.

Click to play — and to pause

A small touch that feels right: in the Default and Simple themes, clicking the video that’s already loaded in the player now toggles play and pause instead of restarting it from the beginning. Clicking a different video loads it as before.

Smoother updates behind the scenes

We also changed how the block and playlist-theme assets are versioned: they now refresh automatically whenever they’re updated. In short, you’ll always be running the latest scripts and styles without having to clear caches by hand.

Update today

Video Hub 2.1 is available now — just update from your WordPress dashboard. If you currently use the old “YouTube playlist ID” option in a playlist block, open the block and switch it to a category (or a manual selection) to keep things rendering as you expect.

As always, we’d love to hear what you think. Happy importing! 🎬

Say hello to Video Hub 2.0

We’re excited to roll out our biggest update yet. YouTube Hub is now Video Hub, and version 2.0 rebuilds the parts of the plugin you rely on most — background imports, error handling, the block editor and the playlist themes.

Here’s what’s new and why you’ll like it.

A new name: Video Hub

You’ll notice the plugin is now called Video Hub everywhere in your dashboard — the plugin name, the blocks, the Elementor widget and every notice. Same plugin, same team, a name that better fits where we’re taking it. There’s nothing you need to do; all your settings, playlists and imported videos stay exactly as they are.

Imports that just keep running

If you’ve ever had automatic imports quietly stop, this release is for you. Video Hub 2.0 moves automatic imports onto Action Scheduler — the same proven background-processing system that powers WooCommerce — instead of the old page-load trigger.

In plain terms: your imports now run reliably in the background, even on quiet sites and on hosts where the previous method was blocked.

To keep you informed, we added two things:

– A Status page that shows how your imports are doing at a glance — scheduler health, the last and next run, queue counts and key environment info.
– A friendly heads-up notice if the background queue ever stalls (usually because WP-Cron is disabled on your host). It’s now dismissible, and it’ll come back on its own if things stall again later.

Smarter handling of YouTube errors

YouTube hiccups happen — a quota limit, rate limiting, a brief outage. Until now, a single error could pull a perfectly good playlist out of your queue. Not anymore.

– The “Remove playlist from queue on YouTube error” option now waits for 5 errors in a row before unpublishing a playlist, so one-off glitches are simply ignored.
– After an error, that playlist waits a little longer before each retry instead of hammering the API every cycle — while all your other playlists keep importing on schedule.
– The moment a playlist imports successfully again, everything resets automatically.

Developers: you can tune this with the `cbc_yt_error_unpublish_threshold` and `cbc_yt_error_backoff_minutes` filters.

Four blocks for the editor

Video Hub now feels right at home in the block editor, with live previews as you build:

– Video Hub Video — drop in a single video.
– Video Hub Playlist — show a full playlist.
– Post Video — embed the video attached to the post you’re viewing, lazy-loaded for speed.
– Video Archive — list your videos as a grid or list, with a muted preview on hover.

We also rebuilt the `[cbc_video]` and `[cbc_playlist]` shortcodes on a cleaner shared foundation, so shortcodes and blocks now behave identically.

Fresh playlist themes

Your playlists get a serious visual upgrade. Three brand-new themes:

– Cinema — a large, dark, cinematic layout.
– Grid — a responsive grid with a “View details” pop-up.
– Minimal — a clean list with neat thumbnails, duration badges and pagination, opening videos in a large lightbox.

And the classics got a makeover:

– Default now uses 16:9 thumbnails, duration badges, a scrollable list and a subtle “now playing” indicator on the current video.
– Simple became a big inline “hero” player with a grid of videos beneath it.

One more nicety: when you pick playlist videos by hand, they now appear in the exact order you list them.

Little things that make a big difference

– Add a single video in seconds. Hit Add New on your videos and just paste a YouTube link or ID — Video Hub fetches it before the editor even loads.
– Assign multiple categories to imported videos in one go from the manual import screen.
– A new Add-ons page to discover and install official add-ons.
– Faster front-end. Players can load on first click (so the YouTube player only loads when someone actually plays a video), and thumbnails are fetched on demand instead of all at once.

Update today

Video Hub 2.0 is available now — just update from your WordPress dashboard.

A quick heads-up if you’ve built custom integrations: because we renamed the blocks and the Elementor widget (`WPYTHub *` → `Video Hub *`), moved imports onto Action Scheduler and reorganized the plugin internally, 2.0 is a major release. It’s worth a quick look at any custom code after you update.

As always, we’d love to hear what you think. Happy importing!