oEmbed & BP-Links – perhaps not competitors?
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I am fans of both r-a-y’s oEmbed and Mrmaz’s BP-Links plugins (in fact, i have had many conversations with Marshal about the direction of the plugin. I was just catching up on my forum post reading when it occured to me that, in some ways these plugins do 2 different things with their target content and perhaps the functionality might eventually grow together…or not.
Here’s what I mean: It’s all about workflow and what the user is trying to do. in some cases you have a user that is cruising along, writing a post or reply and happens to want to include some rich media he found as part of the post. Bingo – oEmbed… which is great for bringing content right into the stream’s conversational flow. BUT… after some time the flow goes on and the content gets pushed on. Archival/Directory/Browsability becomes an issue.
Now, with BP-Links, it’s the exact opposite. Not so easy to slap some comment into you conversation because the process of entry is much more deliberate, BUT you end up having a rich set of external resources brought into a site and that has great value/potential. What might be a very cool meeting of these two expert minds (or plugins, as it were) would be something that allowed both…
Quick and easy embedding in posts on the fly coupled with a captured set of info you could later organize, etc (as in BP-Links)
What are your thoughts?
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oEmbed for BP does one thing very simple – it utilizes WordPress’ own oEmbed class — type in a plain-text oEmbeddable URL and voila! — there are no plans to do anything special in the future (like categorization, etc).
I wholeheartedly endorse MrMaz’s BP Links plugin; I have stated this in other posts and I”ll say it again – BP-Links will be the definitive rich embedding plugin for BP.
We have briefly talked privately about manipulating the activity stream for embedding content (btw MrMaz, let me know if you need a sounding board for the next version of BP-Links!).
He has some neat things planned including plugging into the “What’s New” box, which will solve the “quick and easy embedding” issue Mike has talked about above.
At the end of the day, the cool thing is you have choices!
it all depends on your BP network’s needs.
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