I’ll be straight with you – for a long time, adding media (other than text) to WordPress just flat out sucked. You had to switch the site to Text (HTML) mode, paste in the object/embed code, and prayed that it looked right once you were finished. It wasn’t necessarily a fault of WordPress – it was that the methods were just not what they needed to be to advance.
Queue up responsive design, a switch away from object/embeds to iFrames (for mobile access), and… it sucked even more. For some reason, the visual editor absolutely did not cooperate with iFrames, and it left a lot of site creators begging for a better alternative.
oEmbed, while not directly developed by WordPress, is a great standard for allowing content to easily be dropped into WordPress’ visual editor. By simply pasting in the url (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbvxlvSIIww) for the example below, WordPress will recognize the URL as a youtube video and will create the appropriate player!
Adding an oEmbed Medium to WordPress
Adding a supported oEmbed link is easy – simply paste the link into the visual editor.
Supported Sites
There are quite a few sites supported – quite a few of them brought in by the latest release of WordPress (straight from the codex:)
- Animoto
- Blip
- CollegeHumor
- DailyMotion
- Flickr
- FunnyOrDie
- Hulu
- Imgur
- Issuu
- Meetup
- EmbedArticles
- Mixcloud
- Photobucket
- PollDaddy
- Rdio
- Revision3
- Scribd
- SlideShare
- SmugMug
- SoundCloud
- Spotify
- TED
- Vimeo
- WordPress
- YouTube
- iSnare
WordPress 4.0 actually makes oEmbeds even sweeter – by pasting in the link directly, the visual editor will actually show you a visual representation of what your embedded media will look like in the context of your article – neat-o!
WordPress oEmbed support is amazing. That is all.
— CMDR Mitchcraft ⚙️???? (@thatmitchcanter) October 6, 2014