TUTORIAL: Adding an oEmbed Provider to WordPress

I don’t often write tutorials. I probably should. But normally it’s only when someone asks me something and I think, “Hey, self… you should write up how to do this”. As if a book wasn’t enough.

Last night I was at the Austin Web Holiday party, a gathering of some 15+ technical meetup groups cross-pollinating over beer and socializing. I was introduced to one guy (can’t remember his name!) who had built a video site and enabled it for oEmbed. He couldn’t understand why WordPress wouldn’t just automatically let users use his videos, like it does for YouTube, Vimeo, etc. The full list of default oEmbed providers are listed here.

WordPress doesn’t allow automatic use of oEmbed for security reasons. Otherwise, someone could build a video service stuffed with malicious code that could potentially access your database or create a man in the middle attack or worse. WordPress.com certainly doesn’t allow arbitrary oEmbed sites and the dot-org open source software doesn’t allow arbitrary stuff automatically. But it can be done, on the dot-org side, with a plugin. All it is a hook.

Here’s an example. If you want to register an oEmbed video site that is, say, at (randomly) http:/mysuperawesomevideosite.com and your videos are of the format http://mysuperawesomevideosite.com/video/*, it’s as simple as adding a function in your plugin (or more properly from a PHP perspective, a method in a class – but that’s a personal preference. The method/function should call the wp_oembed_add_provider() function.

In it’s simplest form, all you have to do is:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21

class My_Plugin {

var $oembed_endpoint;
var $oembed_format;

function __construct()
{
$this->oembed_endpoint = ‘http://mysuperawesomevideosite.com’;
$this->oembed_format = ‘http://mysuperawesomevideosite.com/video/*’;

$this->new_oembed();
}

function __destruct() {}

function new_oembed()
{
wp_oembed_add_provider( $this->oembed_format, $this->oembed_endpoint );
}

}

Then, to make this code work, just instantiate the class somewhere.

1	$my_plugin = new My_Plugin;

Voila!