The Protected Embeds feature of WordPress.com VIP allows you to embed rich media from services around the web into your posts. Today we made a few updates to the feature:
Automatic Resizing
Historically, the “Add Embed” interface has allowed you to specify a width and height of the resulting iframe, but if you didn’t specify those parameters, they would be set to whatever a user’s browser chose as default dimensions. A number of VIP clients have reported that this can create undesirable behavior for displaying rich media.
Today we’ve updated the Protected Embeds system to automatically resize the media iframe to fill 100% of the available width in the post’s content area, and display at 100% height of the media being displayed. This automatic resizing will only happen if your protected embed shortcode does not specify a width and/or height attribute. If you have existing embeds that are currently defaulting to the browser sizing and you don’t want them to automatically resize, you’ll need to add the height and/or width attribute to the shortcode.
Detect origin domain
We are now passing in the origin domain of the page where a Protected Embed is displayed from. This is useful for various kinds of ad displays and media hosting services that are able to vary their output based on the origin of the request. The origin is appended to the HTTP_REFERER header as an additional wpcom_origin GET param. Here’s an example:
http://wpcomwidgets.com/?wpcom_origin=http%3A%2F%2Fvip.wordpress.com
If your embedded media uses JavaScript, you can access the origin domain via document.referrer.
We hope these updates make Protected Embeds even more powerful for displaying rich media on your sites. If you have any questions about these changes, please don’t hesitate to contact us.
WordPress VIP Lobby 