Poll: Have You Used the oEmbed Feature for Posts?

When WordPress 4.4 “Clifford” was released in December of 2015, it turned WordPress into an oEmbed provider. This made it easy for sites running on WordPress 4.4 or later to have its content embedded on other sites.

Here’s an example of what content from a WordPress site looks like when embedded in a post.

Feature Plugin Merge Proposal: oEmbed

When we wrote about the feature on the Tavern, a number of readers expressed concern that it should be disabled by default without the use of a plugin. When Pascal Birchler, who developed the feature, was questioned why this isn’t the case, he responded, “Such a feature shouldn’t get an option to disable it because only few people should ever feel they need to do that.”

“The new embed functionality has been developed with the majority of users in mind. It just needs to grow. Imagine that you can paste a URL for a WordPress site, and know that it will be embedded in your editor.”

During the conversation, the Disable Embeds plugin was recommended as a way to disable oEmbeds for posts. Since the release of WordPress 4.4 eight months ago, the plugin has accumulated more than 5,000 active installs.

The most popular reason for disabling post embeds is to be able to write a full URL in the editor without it turning into an iFrame, as Jenny Beaumont explains in her review.

I had gotten used to many auto embeds in WordPress like those for Twitter and Youtube, but hadn’t run across a case where I actually wanted to publish a straight link. Until today.

It was extremely frustrating to realize that I could no longer do that, that I was being forced to display the link (to a simple web page) as an embedded excerpt of the page. This handy plugin fixed that right up, leaving my other embeds in tact.

Now that oEmbeds for posts have existed for at least eight months, we want to know if you’ve used them at least once. I’ve used them a few times in my ICYMI series of posts but the vast majority of time, the oEmbed ruins the flow of an article whereas a link does not. Please take a moment to vote in the poll and leave your thoughts in the comments.

[poll id=”59″]