Oh, Embed

http://www.flickr.com/photos/beginasyouare/4083904850/

We are thick in the middle of WordPress here in DTLT, constantly creating new sites for ourselves, and wouldn’t you know, now helping great gobs of faculty with their domains and WordPress installs. We are daily discovering new ways to twist WordPress into our heart’s desire of a publishing platform.

What I have long concentrated on in regards to digital publishing has been various types of media (you know, as the New Media Specialist). We get at including video and images in WordPress posts with “embeds” which is the process of inserting code into the editor along with the text. YouTube, Vimeo, and other sites include “embed code” to copy and paste into web documents to allow for easy media publishing.

In DTLT’s long history of working with WordPress, we have seen all manner of plugins that have come and gone, to give us the media publishing capabilities. We’ve also used the embed codes from services that have come and gone. What can happen over time is that remnants of posts are left that used long forgotten plugin “short codes” and embed code that no longer works. What I have been recommending of late is that people use the built in feature of WordPress for embeds. It’s a technology known as oEmbed. As the WordPress site states, it makes embedding media content “super easy”. It also future-proofs the media that you embed. Plugins and code can go, but what remains is the link to the media, so as long as that media exists on the hosting sites, you always follow the URL to the media.

How can take advantage of the easy embed? Well, it really is easy. Just simply go to the page for the media that you want to embed in a WordPress post and just copy and paste the link into your editor window. Just be sure you are in the text editor as some of the oEmbeds don’t work in the visual editor. For example if I want to embed a Vimeo video, I would paste in the link to the corresponding video page. An example would look like:

https://vimeo.com/44526439

What would show would be:

I’ve got an example page for other supported media sites, which include Vimeo, YouTube, Flickr, Slideshare, and even Twitter. It simply shows how the embedded media looks in the blog post or page. It’s dead simple.

This is part 1 in a series on WordPress embeds.

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7 Responses

  1. I’m super in favor in this route; also worth mentioning is auto embeds of tweets.

    Quite a few of my students ran into challenges of embeds not sure if is new twenty twelve theme. Some looked like gunk from formatting interference, so I would have the copy and delete URL, replace with “URL goes here” and paste it in in the text editor.

    Would be nice if it accepted short form of YouTube URL (have not tested) or if URL has extraneous gunk.

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