One of the feature plugins for WordPress right now is an oEmbed API. I spent a little time playing with it and talking to its maintainer, Pascal Birchler. The plugin has some interesting potential use cases, and really works quite well. It’s also flexible, and customizable, and could make a good candidate for WordPress core inclusion.
Essentially the oEmbed API makes WordPress posts embeddable in an environment that supports oEmbed — such as WordPress! So you can put a WordPress post in a WordPress post. It would look like this:
The output is an iframe, and can consist of any WordPress URL, whether your own site or from another that supports oEmbed. The output can be customized to do things like alter the look of the excerpt, include additional meta data, and other nice options. The bottom bar uses the site name and favicon and elements can be hidden with CSS, but not currently with filters.
This has some use cases I think are promising. The most obvious use would be for a more significant post reference. For instance, I could use these embeds as part of the members only content.
Or someone could use it for their team page. Or someone could make a listicle of other sites. I would like to customize its output so members could embed their profiles from Post Status on their own sites.
I’m not sure we yet know the best ways this can be used; but supporting oEmbed is generally a decent idea. Many other platforms do it (YouTube, Twitter, etc), and it’s a fairly low overhead item for WordPress to support as well.
If you want to try it out, you can download the plugin off WordPress.org, contribute on Github, and follow along with the Make WordPress Core posts.
