I was screwing around with YouTube the other day, and I found out something rather disturbing about the TinyMCE editor inside WordPress: it screws up YouTube embedding. Since I don't use the rich-text editor, I had no idea there was even a problem. Well, there's a problem. I thought it was just a fault of the chair to keyboard connector, but it seems that you need a plugin, yada yada yada. As you know, I hate being wrong about things, so I did the simplest of things, I started screwing with the buttons. But first, I had to get out of Safari. That's because Safari doesn't give you the chance to use the TinyMCE editor (that's the name of the WYSIWYG visual HTML editor). I have to use plain-text whenever I post a story. I opened up Firefox, logged in, and found out what they said was correct, even using the HTML button keeps the embed from showing up. BUT I WILL NOT GIVE UP! To be honest, I couldn't care less if the thing worked or not. I don't use the visual text editor, so I don't have a problem. But, since most people do, and they want the thing to work, I decided to figure out a way to hack the editor to make things work out. Like I said before, for whatever reason, the HTML button didn't work. Next, I came up with a truly brillant plan: using the image button. The image editor in WordPress 2.0 is really great, and it lets you do a lot of things to images, but I just don't have all the bells/whistles when using the plain-text version of the editor. Not really a problem, since I do most of my image editing in Photoshop. But if I'm going to figure out how to make this thing work in WordPress, that would be my best shot. I simply clicked the image adder, just like I would if I were entering an image, and instead of putting in an image URL, I put in the embed code. At first, I thought I'd figured it out, but it just wouldn't stay after I saved it. Like I said, this is mere hackery. Inside your rich-text editor, this will look like a broken image, but it appears to work. There are some things you need to remember to make this all work, however:

  1. You cannot save the page and continue editing. When you come back, no video.
  2. Even looking in plain-text editor, after saving, the embed was gone.

So, on to something else. I will make this happen! Back to HTML, I figure, so let's look at what's inside the code...what if I only used part of it? I took out the first part of the code from YouTube provided, and just put in the embed> part. No dice. And that's when I quit. Yep, I admitted defeat, and stopped messing with it. I'm man enough to realize when I've been beat, and this time I lost to a javascript editor. Oh, how will I go on? This calls for snack cakes, crying, and old Air Supply albums. In case you want to take a shot at not just turning off the TinyMCE and editing the code "by hand," here's three plugins you could try:

The best advice from me is to just turn the rich-text editor off (in your user profile). Not just for when you want to post a video, but all the time. Half of the errors from the HTML in people's pages come from messed-up code in visual editors. WordPress also has QuickTags, which allow you all the editing options, without the messy code, and video embedding hacks (that don't even work).

status: published
lastmod: '2006-10-23T04:01:39.000Z'
author: John Stansbury
cms: wordpress
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  similarterms: editor work image video wordpress code html things youtube editing plugin make problem embed tinymce plain-text button thing figure inside