WordPress has been operating as an oEmbed consumer for quite some time, allowing users to easily embed content from other sites. As of version 4.4, WordPress becomes an oEmbed provider as well, allowing any oEmbed consumer to embed posts on WordPress sites.
It is worth remembering that WordPress supports oEmbeds since version 2.9 so it is not a novelty, although the way to do it now is much simpler, so much so that many users do not want it enabled. Disable oEmbed in WordPress 4.4 by following this easy tutorialbecause by default you will have it activated.
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Since the recent WordPress 4.4 release, all sites using the latest version of WordPress automatically become an oEmbed provider themselves. This means that other bloggers can add your post to their website (other than yours) just by adding the post URL to their own post.
Embedded content using this protocol should not be confused with content copying. Although in both cases the permission of the source or author is always important to consider. Don’t stone copyright!
What is oEmbed?
Using oEmbed you can easily integrate content from one website into another. Many websites such as Twitter (Twitter Cards), Google+, YouTube, etc., use this technology to insert their own content on external sites.
This type of website allows other websites to embed their content by embedded protocol and that is why they are called oEmbed providers.
An embedded content used to be called within a post or page with the following syntax:
Note: These types of embeds support additional parameters.
If the WordPress site from which you copy the link (url) to embed it in a blog post works with WordPress version 4.4. or higheryou can save the short code since simply with the url it will be detected and represented in your post.
WordPress supports many oEmbed providers by default that is why you can easily embed videos, tweets, videos and much more just by pasting the URL and not the embed code (usually using iframes, although oEmbed also makes use of iframes).
In the following video I show you how you can insert external posts into your Blog posts using the oEmbed protocol.
What are the drawbacks of using external posts with oEmbed?
Any user who can see your Blog will be able to use content from your blog using the oEmbed protocol. He will not need to ask your permission to do so. Although it should, for a matter of ethics!
Every time a user visits a blog post that has embedded your blog post, they will be making an HTTP call to your server, with the consequent consumption of resources. The images, as a general rule, will be the ones that take the longest to be displayed because they have to be read remotely first.
It doesn’t matter if you use on your website WP Super Cache or another plugin to cache content, any embedded post, coming from external sites, will not be cached, it will be necessary to load it remotely first to be displayed.
If the original owner of the content modifies or changes images of that post embedded in your site through oEmbed, the changes will also be visible on your website. Apparently it does not represent any problem. And if the external owner decides to put images of adult content, these images would also be visible on your website.
Testing, 1, 2 3…
I’ll give you an example so you understand.
We have a website that we want to display on the blog, a post from another WordPress website, which works with the latest version of WordPress.
We copy the url of the post that we want to show inside a post of our WordPress Blog with the latest version, using the oEmbed protocol and paste it inside our post.
The result will be that within our Blog, in a specific post, the external content of the blog post that we have copied will be seen, without the need to use iframes or more complex methods.
These posts can only be embedded from posts or pages, using the visual editor Noel Text editor.
That shows? Well, as you may have seen in the screenshot, the “guest” post loaded through the oEmbed protocol will show a summary of the original post, the title of the post and its image, the comment icon and the social network icon.
The plugin to disable it
There is a plugin that allows you to disable this functionality that is activated by default, especially if you have updated to WordPress 4.4. that you should have done it already!
The plugin is called Disable Embeds and like all the usual WordPress plugins, you can install it from the dashboard, plugins, Add new.
You install it, you enable it and that’s it!
In the following video I explain how to install the plugin Disable Embeds to disable the option that your posts can be embedded in external sites (even as a citation) through oEmbed.
If you are a developer and want to know a little more about this functionality of WordPress 4.4, check in about it.
To modify the output view in your posts you should modify the file /wp-includes/embed-template.php. Do it at your own risk and only if you have programming knowledge!
It may be too soon to determine if this functionality will end up being to the liking of the millions of users who work with WordPress on a daily basis. Perhaps sites with little traffic do not suffer much from this practice, but for sites with a lot of content and traffic, it would be necessary to analyze the impact that this can generate on the resources of the server where the Hosting account is hosted.
Do you already use content from other sites in your Blog using the oEmbed technology available in WordPress?
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Technical support in CyberProtector. Teacher at University
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