Youtube Hugo-Shortcode workaround - when {{< youtube >}} won´t work

Inspired by a recent post from my friend, (Go)Hugo and Git mentor Michael Gasch 😉, where he describes how he fixed the Hugo Shortcode for Twitter to suppress the default thread view, it came to my mind immediately that I faced a similar issue when I started blogging with the Shortcode which embeds a Youtube-Video into your post.

See how Michael fixed the normal behavior for the Twitter Shortcode {{< tweet >}} here…

…and add it to your Shortcode folder to make advantages from.

When {{< youtube >}} won´t work for your theme

Besides embedding a tweet into your post e.g. to give a statement more expression/ more emphasis, or to comment a topic related tweet, or simply because it´s pretty cool, a Youtube-Video is also a good alternative.

I´m running the Casper-Two Theme for my Blog and back when I wrote "Sometimes you gotta run before you can walk", I absolutely wanted to have the IRON MAN I First Armor test Video included and it didn´t work straight from the start.

Let me show you what I mean

I´ll add the video “Shortcodes | Hugo - Static Site Generator | Tutorial 9” here at this point of the post by using {{< youtube 2xkNJL4gJ9E >}} in my post *.md file. 👇

Normally you would see the mentioned Youtube video here ☝️ but it seems that the Shortcode won´t work for my chosen theme.

You are not alone

The best thing to do first, from my point of view, is not to google the (mis-)behavior, but rather go to the Github-Repo from your theme and have a look at the Issues. If there exists one, comment…if not…raise one.

So I had a look at the issues for Casper-Two and indeed, there´s already one open which covers this issue. I commented this as well and a really short period of time later, Salar Rahmanian had the code snippet for it.

This is simply great and one of thousands of things I´m really impressed with regarding Github and the Community.

The Code

As Michael already described it in his post, we have to create a new empty file and this time we´ll call it yt.html.

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cd <HUGO_BLOG_ROOT>
touch layouts/shortcodes/yt.html

Put the following lines of code into the yt.html file and save it.

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<iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/{{ index .Params 0 }}?start={{ index .Params 1 }}"
        style="position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 560; height: 315;"
        allowfullscreen frameborder="0"
        title="YouTube Video">
</iframe>

This time I´ll make use of our new Shortcode {{< yt >}} instead of {{< youtube >}} et voilà…

…here we go 👍. Thanks again Salar!

Getting more interest in building your own Shortcodes?

Go here: Create Your Own Shortcodes

“You can extend Hugo’s built-in shortcodes by creating your own using the same templating syntax as that for single and list pages.”