Working with videos in Content Management Systems (CMS)

There are a few things to know when handling videos in Content Management Systems (CMS). Are you set to become a pro CMS editor? Then please read on:

Video Hosting

You might not be aware, but CMS are not a great place to host video. CMS run on web hosting, which is in most cases not suitable for hosting of large files. Also consider that the video file (for example an .mp4 video format) that you have locally on your desktop might not be optimized for the web.

On the other hand, video platforms such as youtube or vimeo have specialized in video hosting. Videos uploaded on video platforms are auto-magically compressed and optimized for the web, for the maximum compatibility! Doesn’t that sound like the right choice for hosting videos!

Good to know: Platforms such as youtube allow you to host videos for your website without showing them anywhere else, for example your youtube channel. This special mode is called an “unlisted” video.

Now how do we get Youtube play nicely together with your CMS? You have probably already seen that the video component in your CMS allows to insert a Youtube link. Let’s go get that link on youtube!

Step 1: Create an “unlisted” video on Youtube

Go to https://studio.youtube.com/ – if you don’t have a Google Account, maybe now is a good time to set up a shared gmail address for your department or team. Make sure you select the right channel or create a new one. Since it won’t be public anyway, you dont need to upload a logo or care about any optional fields. Then at some point you can upload your video:

Here you can just drag and drop your video
Set the visibility to “unlisted”
click on the link after the video has finished processing
copy the first part of the video url from the browser address bar (without &feature=youtu.be)

Step 2: Edit the page in the CMS where you would like to add the video, add a video component

This is how it looks in django CMS:

simply paste the link from youtube into your CMS video component. In django CMS it’s called video player and the field is situated in the Embed video section.

Once you save, you can now see your video nicely embedded on your page!

Pro Tipp for Youtube

Did you notice the small video thumbnails that youtube puts at the end of your video to keep the user engaged? This is often not desirable. You can limit those previews to show only other (public) videos from your channel. In django CMS’ video component this behaviour can be configured with the Parameters field right below the video URL field. Just hit the + button and set a parameter rel to the value 0. In other systems you can try appending &rel=0 to the video URL. Try this example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nOo2lrPXSo&rel=0