Monday, November 22, 2010

Gotcha of the Day: WordPress Auto-Embedding Stops Working

Auto-Embedding in WordPress is one of those cool features That Just Work. By simply checking the auto-embeds checkbox in the media section, a bare URL will automatically get turned into embedded content.

That is, until it stopped working on one my client's sites.

I poked and prodded and just couldn't explain why the feature was working in the customer's dev area, but not in production.

After more time than I'd like to admit, I finally got around to applying the debugging strategy that one should always try first with any WordPress problem: disable plugins. Rather than turning them all off, I looked for the most suspicious one - and sure enough there was a good candidate.

I turned off the Raw HTML plugin, and sure enough, the autoembed feature is back to working.

Apparently the Raw HTML plugin gets a bit overzealous and doesn't allow the auto embed filter functionality to execute properly.

The Raw HTML plugin breaks auto embedding, and one should always start off a debugging session by turning off plugins. Lessons learned.

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