oEmbed, as the wikipedia page puts it, is an open format for obtaining an embeddable representation of an object. As suggested in the comments in an earlier post, I’ve now extended my Idno Embedded post plugin to support oEmbed.

It works by providing an endpoint that other sites can query, passing the permalink of the thing they’re wanting to embed, a format parameter (currently only json is supported), and any other content specific parameters (e.g. maxwidth and maxheight).

You can pass a permalink of an idno post to this endpoint, and you’ll be returned a JSON data structure containing some details about it. Additionally, if you pass a callback parameter, you’ll get this data as JSONP, which may be more useful.

Here’s some example code, using jQuery for convenience:

This example makes use of the JSONP callback to update all div elements of class oembed, with the URL from the data-url parameter.

Because of this bug, at the moment you’ll need to use my branch of the bonita template library, which applies this fix, in order for the oEmbed functionality to work.

Currently, all posts will default to the 'rich' data type, however you can extend this by providing your own entity class templates and provide specific details for your own custom types.

» Visit the project on Github...

I’ve previously talked about the embed plugin I wrote for Idno.

The previous version made use of JQuery to call a JSONP endpoint, which was done because I was planning to construct the embed by manipulating the DOM tree.

This proved rather complicated (although there are reasons for doing this, so I may swing back to it), especially if you wanted to preserve the individual Idno site’s custom skinning, so I opted for an IFRAME approach.

I’ve now tidied the code to remove this JQuery requirement, and now the embed code produces an IFrame directly, rather like the related wordpress plugin.

Elgg, like Idno supports a number of different views on data – standard HTML, JSON etc. However, unlike Idno, Elgg does not natively support JSONP.

JSONP allows you to make cross domain calls using JSON data, and is very handy for querying data from other sources using your fancy-pants javascript/jquery ajax code. It’s how, among other things, the idno feed widget running in the sidebar works.

Anyway, a commenter on another post asked about Elgg support, and because I had a few minutes spare, I put together a quick plugin!

» Visit the project on Github...