Development on a Shoestring

Noembedder WordPress Plugin

Summary

This plugin will add a noembed section no any embedded content that does not already have one. This is very handy for people reading your site in an RSS reader, as a lot of them don’t display embedded content. By default it will put this message in there:

There is embedded content here that you cannot see. Please open the post in a web browser to see this

Additionally, for YouTube and GameVidoes content, it will also display the thumbnail of the video in the noembed section.

Installation

The download zip file contains 2 files. Extract both into your plugins folder (if you already have plugin_base.php in that folder, overwrite it with the one in this zip file). As always, feedback is welcomed & appreciated.

More Details

From Nick Bradbury’s post RSS Good Practices: Provide Alternate Content When Embedding Video:

Lately I’ve noticed a lot of feeds that contain embedded videos which fail to provide alternate content for readers who can’t view the videos.  For example, a number of feeds use the HTML <embed> tag to embed video objects but neglect to include <noembed> sections.  The end result is a less-than-optimal experience for many people.

A more user-friendly solution would be to include a <noembed> section that contains a thumbnail image of the video which links to the actual video

Sites like Youtube, Google Video, Soapbox and Game Videos all provide ways to embed their videos on your site, but not one of them provides a <noembed> section for people who can’t see the embedded content. This is a pity, especially for bloggers who often have readers who only see their content through a feed reader. So this plugin is designed to fix this problem. I really hope this is a short-term solution until Youtube et. al. supply noembed tags with their code.

The link there will link back to the post on your blog. There is an options page for the plugin where you can change the message to whatever you want. Any HTML can be put in there, just remember that this will most likely be seen by people who can’t view fancy content, so you probably want to keep it simple.

As an extra, because Youtube provides a developer API, for any Youtube vidoes, this plugin will also show a thumbnail of the video above whatever message is set in options. This image will also be a link back to the original post. This is made possible using Aaron Colflesh excellent php XML parser class and the Youtube functionality borrows heavily from Erik De Vries’ phpYoutube class. In fact I originally used this class, but in the end I just rewrote the small part I needed. Not because there is anything wrong with his script, but because it was overkill for the small functionality I needed for this plugin.

  • Excellent plugin for SEO, thanks!
  • […] Noembedder WordPress Plugin - Development on a Shoestring […]
  • PapyGeek
    Hello!

    Great plugin here!

    It's working great, I've only two little problems with it :

    - When strange characters are used (in the description I think), the RSS parsed from Youtube is troncated and so, no thumnail is returned. I think I had the problem for such an URL : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X76ZIGQgBWg
    - I am using Viper video Plugin : http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/vipers-vide... but the code generated is different and has no embed section, it looks like this :
    <div id="vvq46a70253769a2" class="vvqbox vvqyoutube" style="width: 425px; height: 335px; visibility: visible;"><object data="http://www.youtube.com/v/tFeiLsElPsI" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" height="335" width="425"><param value="transparent" name="wmode"></object></div>


    (XHTML compliant ?)

    I don't even know if it is possible to add a noembeded section, but it would be nice.

    Thanks for your plugin, and sorry for my English ;)
  • Great read...enjoyed the information and comments. Check out Video-ology.com for more videos and info.
  • Nice article! This is a very useful tip. Thanks.
  • Excellent plugin for SEO, thanks!
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