Fighting seagulls A long standing issue on sites is how to treat the embedding of different content on your site in a user friendly and standard compliant way.

Usually YouTube gives you an embed-code with an object-tag and a nested embed-tag which your not-that-html-knowledgeable users should try to insert into their content - bypassing a wysiwyg etc.

With oEmbed no embed-codes needs to be pasted in anymore. It's an open standard for the automatic embedding of content using just the ordinary url to the resource.

The standard is natively supported by Flickr, Vimeo, Hulu, Qik etc, and since a week ago also Scribd. Many popular sites that don't support oEmbed natively are supported by third party initiatives like oohEmbed (which is released as open source).

Our oEmbed module for Drupal, which I've now released on Drupal.org, supports both embedding of other sites content into a Drupal site and embedding of the Drupal site's content on other oEmbed consuming sites.

This release is contains the base features needed, but there's still much work I'm planning on getting done on it. Among other things the module could make use of a better admin interface to make it easy to add support for new oEmbed sites without hacking the code. It could also be interesting to try and make use of the auto discovery for oEmbed, with security in mind of course, to discover new embeddable content.

An example of a Flickr-image embedded with the oEmbed module can be seen at the top of this entry - embedded by just pasting http://www.flickr.com/photos/wetterberg/3478520059/ into the textarea. It can of course be styled to your own needs.

The module is production ready - we're using it on a couple of live sites. Download it and replace your current URL-filter in your input filter with the oEmbed filter.