Joomla Embed.ly Plugin: Improving Content embedding
Please Note: Plugin download link is at the very bottom of the article before the comments!
If there is one thing we love at Verge Studios, then it is using simple solutions for complex problems. One of the most annoying problems of working in a media rich world is embedding that media in web content. It's no problem if you have a an embed generator like Youtube does where all you need to do is click on the embed link and out comes some copy and pastable html code. However multiply this by 100 different services from twitpic over liveleak to Dinosaur Comics, and you are busy copy and pasting embed code more than you are actually enjoying content. The Joomla Community has been very industrious in the past and has come up with numerous content plugin solutions that will use short code ex: [youtube]link_to_video[/youtube] to render the appropriate embed code. However, the problem with most of these is that they have a fixed number of services, and if you want to add any other services, you either have to add them yourself to the plugin code, or hope the author updates them. The solution: Embed.ly an online service that will transform links for you into embeddable html, which continuously increases it list of supported services.
Using an hour of our time and their hosted and continuously updated javascript, we have created a content plugin for Joomla that will transform any links into their respective embeddable code. In true Verge Studios fashion, the basic configuration is very simple and should work out of the box. However we have included an advanced parameters section that will allow you to set exactly what links to transform and which to ignore (css classes),set image constraints, and also to limit the services accessed.
The use is very simple. All you need to do is take a link to one of the embed.ly supported services and enclose it in [embedly ][/embedly] tags. So for example a sample code inside a Joomla article would show:
Please note that I have left a space after the inside first embedly tag so I can render the above code and not have the plugin transform it into an embed code.
The result of the above code is here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1vMpkIRAjo&feature=related
So where do we go from here? Embed.ly is still a very young service. However they already provide over 100 embed codes for various places throughout the web. Check out their list here. They offer scrips for Python, PHP, Ruby, and Javascript. We are even able to specify width and height on a code by code basis. So for example:
Will render the URL with a given width and height
As the API develops we will be adding more plugin parameters.
Below find 3 more examples of using embed.ly on various services.
http://twitpic.com/2bjk8ghttp://www.slideshare.net/sproutinc/sprout-building-brands-on-social-networks-feb-4th-2010
http://xkcd.com/303/
| File | Description | File size |
|---|---|---|
 plg_vergeembedly.zip | Plugin to render embedded content using the Embed.ly API from a provided URL. | 14 Kb |
raptor23
August 06, 2010 at 09:26 pm