Automattic Adds New Media Explorer Tool For Quick Twitter, YouTube Embeds In WordPress.com

Automattic, the parent company of the popular publishing platform WordPress.com, has released a new Media Explorer tool so users can add tweets and YouTube videos to their posts straight from the WordPress.com post editor. The tool is immediately available for WordPress.com and WordPress.com VIP users, and is coming soon to self-hosted WordPress blogs through Jetpack.

Previously, to embed tweets and videos, users needed to find the specific page, copy the tweet or video’s URL and paste it into the post. Now, users can click ”Add Media” in the post editor page and choose “Insert Tweet” or “Insert Youtube.” From there, they can search tweets by keywords, hashtags, users, reply, mention and location. Once the tweet is found, click “Insert” and the tweet will appear on the page. It’s the same process for embedding a YouTube video. Search by keyword or user, and then insert the video straight from the “Add Media” window.

The Media Explorer plug-in was a joint project between WordPress.com VIP and the WordPress web development agency Code For The People. John Blackbourne from Code For The People explained the idea behind Media Explorer in a blog post:

Embedding a YouTube video or a tweet into a WordPress post is powerfully easy. There’s no HTML, no shortcode, no dialog box or Settings page – just the magic of oEmbed, baked right into WordPress core. But it’s so simple, and so unassuming, that many people just don’t know it’s there; and it’s not something they’d ever go looking for. With Media Explorer, we wanted to expose that magic within the user interface.