Parish Video Center

A WordPress plugin that keeps your site in sync with a Vimeo showcase — built for weekly homilies, sermons, or messages, but happy to host any showcase.

Videos become real WordPress posts (a custom post type), so they get permalinks, show up in site search, and emit schema.org VideoObject structured data for Google video results.

Features

• Automatic sync on a WP-Cron schedule (hourly, twice daily, daily, or weekly), plus a manual Sync Now button and a Test Connection check.
• Your vocabulary — call them Homilies, Sermons, or Messages: the post labels are settings.
• Topics — organize videos into topics (a homily series, a parish mission, any subject), each with its own root-level landing page (/homilies/, /parish-mission/, …). A topic with a Vimeo Showcase ID syncs automatically; one without is curated by hand on the video edit screens. Other topics show as tab links above each landing page's grid. Single videos all live under /video/<slug>/ — the URL pattern search engines associate with watch pages.
• Video-hub landing pages — a split hero features the latest video (player beside a "Latest" badge, short excerpt, and an "Up Next" list), followed by a "Browse all" thumbnail grid with duration badges and pagination; clean single-video pages. A theme can override the templates (archive-svc_video.php / taxonomy-svc_topic.php / single-svc_video.php).
• Recirculation — every single video page ends with a thumbnail grid of other recent videos and a link to the full gallery (count is a setting, 0 hides it; also filterable via svc_related_count).
• Embed anywhere — the "Parish Videos" block (live preview, grid or slider layout) or the [parish_videos count="6" layout="slider" title="Recent Homilies" topic="homilies"] shortcode drops recent videos onto any page, e.g. the homepage. The slider is dependency-free scroll-snap with arrow buttons.
• Embed even where WordPress can't reach — /video-embed/?layout=slider&count=8 serves the collection standalone (no theme chrome, links open the top window, height reported via postMessage) for iframes, locked homepage templates, edge workers, or entirely different sites.
• Click-to-play facade — pages load only a poster image; the Vimeo iframe is injected on click (dnt=1 set on the player), so no third-party requests until the visitor opts in.
• Safe sync semantics — videos removed from the showcase are unpublished (drafted), never deleted, and re-publish if they return. A per-video "Don't overwrite with Vimeo data" lock protects manual edits.
• SEO — VideoObject JSON-LD on single pages (with contentUrl direct .mp4 links on Vimeo plans that expose them), ItemList JSON-LD on the archive, a Google video sitemap at /video-sitemap.xml (advertised in robots.txt), and Open Graph / Twitter player tags so shared links unfurl as playable cards. Thumbnails are sideloaded into the media library.
• Self-updating — new releases on GitHub appear on the normal WordPress updates screen (native Update URI mechanism, no external service).
• Deep links — /your-slug/?v=<vimeo-id> 301s to the matching video page.
• Cache-aware — automatically purges the major page caches (WP Rocket, W3TC, WP Super Cache, LiteSpeed, WP Engine, and more) after content-changing syncs, plugin updates, and settings changes; other setups can hook svc_purge_page_cache.

Installation

1. Grab parish-video-center.zip from the latest release and install it via Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin.
2. Create a personal access token at developer.vimeo.com/apps with the public and private scopes, on the Vimeo account that owns the showcase.
3. Find your showcase ID — the number in the showcase URL: vimeo.com/showcase/1234567 → 1234567.
4. In wp-admin, open the video post type menu → Settings, enter the token, and pick your labels (e.g. Homily / Homilies).
5. Under the video post type menu → Topics, add a topic (e.g. Homilies, slug homilies) with your showcase ID, then back in Settings click Test Connection and Sync Now.

Each topic's landing page appears at yoursite.org/<topic-slug>/; single videos live at yoursite.org/video/<slug>/.

Tip: instead of storing the token in the database, define it in wp-config.php — define( 'VIMEO_TOKEN', '…' ); — which overrides the settings field.

Releases, branches, and channels

• main is stable — what production parishes run. Stable releases are tags vX.Y.Z on main.
• beta is the staging branch — changes land here first and ship as pre-releases tagged vX.Y.Z-beta.N.

Pushing any v* tag triggers the release workflow (.github/workflows/release.yml): it verifies the plugin's version header and SVC_VERSION match the tag, builds parish-video-center.zip with git archive, uses that version's readme.txt changelog section as the release notes, and publishes — as a pre-release for -beta tags (invisible to production) or as the latest stable release otherwise.

Update delivery is channel-based: sites default to stable and only ever see stable releases. A staging site opts into betas with the "Receive beta (pre-release) updates" checkbox in the plugin settings and is then offered whichever release — beta or stable — is newest (beta checks cache for 15 minutes; wp transient delete svc_update_check_beta forces a re-check). An SVC_UPDATE_CHANNEL constant in wp-config.php overrides the checkbox; the svc_update_channel filter overrides both.

Shipping a change:

1. Commit to beta, setting the plugin version to e.g. 1.8.0-beta.1 (header and SVC_VERSION).
2. git tag v1.8.0-beta.1 && git push origin beta v1.8.0-beta.1 — staging offers the update shortly after.
3. Verify on staging; iterate with -beta.2 etc. as needed.
4. Promote: merge beta into main, set the version to 1.8.0, add the readme.txt changelog entry, tag v1.8.0, push. Production sees it on the next update check.

Requirements

• WordPress 6.0+
• PHP 7.4+
• A Vimeo plan that supports showcases, and a personal access token

License

GPL-2.0-or-later