Aimax – YouTube Channel Scraper Admin

A premium WordPress plugin designed to manage and scrape YouTube channel data directly from your WP Admin Dashboard. It leverages a powerful Python backend to fetch video details efficiently and securely.

🚀 Overview

The YouTube Channel Scraper provides a seamless interface for WordPress administrators to track multiple YouTube channels and extract their video information (Title, URL, Channel Name, and High-Res Thumbnails). The plugin uses a background processing approach to ensure that high-volume scraping tasks don't slow down your website.

✨ Key Features

• Channel Management: Easily add or remove YouTube channels by their Channel ID.
• Background Scraping: Runs scraping tasks in the background using Python, allowing you to continue other tasks.
• Incremental Extraction: Only fetches and adds new videos, saving time and resources.
• Real-time Status Tracking: Monitor the progress of your scraping tasks (Scraping, Completed, or Error) directly from the dashboard.
• JSON Storage: All scraped data is stored in organized JSON files within your WordPress upload directory, making it easy to use for custom front-end displays or data analysis.
• Premium Admin UI: A clean, responsive dashboard integrated into the WordPress admin area.

🛠️ Technical Stack

• Frontend: WordPress Admin API, HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript (AJAX).
• Backend Logic: PHP (plugin framework & session management).
• Scraper Engine: Python 3.x with yt-dlp for robust data extraction.
• Data Format: JSON.

📋 Prerequisites

Before installing the plugin, ensure your server meets the following requirements:

1. WordPress: Version 5.0 or higher.
2. Python: Version 3.10 or higher installed on the server.
3. yt-dlp: The Python library yt-dlp must be installed (pip install yt-dlp).
4. JWT Authentication: The JWT Authentication for WP REST API plugin is recommended for full functionality.

⚙️ Installation & Setup

1. Plugin Installation

• Upload the youtube-channel-scraper folder to your /wp-content/plugins/ directory.
• Activate the plugin through the 'Plugins' menu in WordPress.

2. Python Environment Setup

Install the required Python library on your server:

pip install yt-dlp

3. Configure Python Path

Out of the box, the plugin is configured for a specific Windows environment. You must update the Python path in youtube-channel-scraper.php to match your server's Python installation.

Open youtube-channel-scraper.php and locate line 100:

$python = '"C:\\Path\\To\\Your\\python.exe"'; // Update this to your system python path

On Linux/Ubuntu, it is typically /usr/bin/python3.

📖 How to Use

1. Navigate to YouTube Scraper in your WordPress Admin Sidebar.
2. Add a Channel: Enter a human-readable name and the 24-character YouTube Channel ID (e.g., UCFNjYL2tt8lqQwPRbFhfpGA).
3. Run Scraper: Click "Scrape Now" on any saved channel.
4. Monitor: The status will update to "⏳ Scraping in progress...". Once finished, it will change to "✅ Scraping completed!".
5. View Data: The scraped JSON files are stored in wp-content/uploads/youtube_scraper/.

📁 File Structure

youtube-channel-scraper/
├── admin/
│   └── dashboard.php      # Admin UI structure
├── css/
│   └── admin-style.css    # Styling for the dashboard
├── js/
│   └── scraper.js         # AJAX logic and UI interactions
├── scraper.py             # Core Python scraping script
├── youtube-channel-scraper.php # Main plugin entry point
└── README.md              # Documentation

⚠️ Important Notes

• Channel ID: Ensure you use the actual Channel ID (starting with UC), not the handle or username.
• Permissions: The plugin creates a directory in wp-content/uploads/. Ensure your web server has write permissions for this folder.
• Shell Execution: Your server must allow the PHP shell_exec and popen functions to run the Python script.

📄 License

This project is licensed under the MIT License.

Developed with ❤️ by A.DEV