Provide help text for inserting a YouTube video

[samikeijonen]

Displays a video from the media library or from YouTube, Vimeo, or another provider.

In Video widget it took me a while that I can enter youtube video by selecting Insert from URL. I was just wondering could there be some kind of help text for that when you select video widget.

For example:

Displays a video from the media library. Or from YouTube, Vimeo, or another provider by selecting Insert from URL.

I also opened another video related issue in #141.

[westonruter]

This is probably better suited for the a core Trac ticket since we are just reusing a core media view. I suggest this be closed in favor of improving the underlying view, which is what would have to be done regardless. Please open a ticket and then comment here with the URL and close.

[westonruter]

Closely related to #149.

[westonruter]

Oh, so the suggestion is to provide the help text via the widget description itself. In that case, it's not a core media issue and should be patched in the plugin.

[samikeijonen]

Yes, sorry for being unclear.

[melchoyce]

I'm not sure the widget description is the best place to include instructions. The description should be a short blurb about what the widget does. We could add a blurb to the "Insert from URL" screen:

(rough, 30 second mockup)

However, you still need to go to "Insert from URL" to see that message. :/

@michelleweber has suggested:

hmm. this feels like trying to shoehorn instructions into what should be a short description. the instructions should come after. i get the problem he’s trying to solve, but this doesn’t seem like the place to solve it. to me, at least. we want people to make informed choices, but we also want to balance that with squishing too much info into things like this. it’s okay if some people don’t understand the URL thing until they get to the video widget settings — that’s where it should be clearly explained. all the detail doesn’t need to be in all the places.

I feel like it’d solve a lot of problems to add subtext to the labels on the left:

• Insert file (for videos in your media library)
• Insert from URL (for videos from youtube, vimeo, or other providers)

i get the problem here, but the solution lies in other parts of the UI.

If you really want to change the description, i’d go with something like: “Display a video from your media library, or add videos from YouTube, Vimeo, or other third-party services using a URL.” but i still think it’s clunky, too much for this description, and will get largely overlooked. and is not the real problem.

To me, this keeps coming back to deficiencies in how we handle media, and the media library, in WordPress itself. I'm not sure there's a great fix here that addresses the issue, and I agree with Michelle that the description isn't really the place to fix this.

[samikeijonen]

This is very minor issue anyways. I can only add that when I first looked at Video widget I thought it would give me same UI than Header media.

1. Select video.
2. Or, enter a YouTube URL:

[melchoyce]

FWIW, I want to change Header Videos to do the same thing and use the media library, instead of the second field. I think it only ended up the way it did because of time.