Publish social content such as tweets and YouTube videos on your website

Increasingly, editors want to enrich their websites by adding (embedding) content from social media such Twitter, YouTube, and so forth. For this reason, XperienCentral offers as default functionality the ability to include this type of external content on your website. This article explains how to do so.

Embed content

1. Navigate to the content item in which you want to embed content in XperienCentral.
2. Hover over the content item title and click [Edit].
3. Move the cursor to the position where you want to place the embedded content. For example:

4. Click [Link] in the toolbar (you can also click [Insert] and then select “Link”): 

5. A pop-up window appears. By “Link to” select “Web”. Fill in the complete URL for the external content you want to embed, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nl0MWMMLUdQ for example.
6. Notice that the “Embed” option is now available. XperienCentral automatically detects whether the selected external content is embeddable and if it is, this option becomes available:

7. Click [Insert] and then [Save].

The result? A fully integrated YouTube video. For example:

Embeddable content

At this time, XperienCentral can embed content from the following external providers:

• YouTube
• Vimeo
• Dailymotion
• Hulu
• Vine
• Instagram
• Flickr
• SlideShare
• Spotify
• SoundCloud
• Twitter
• Ted (talks)
• Scribd

Other embeddable external content providers not supported by XperienCentral can be added upon request so that you can easily integrate them on your website.

A few examples

> Twitter

• Link used: https://twitter.com/gxsoftware/status/745929142437281792

> Instagram

• Link used: https://instagram.com/p/BImZUM8gV2H/?taken-by=nu.nl

Technnical background

The XperienCentral embed functionality makes use of the oEmbed standard. oEmbed was developed in order to make it possible to include content from an external provider without having to copy and paste a URL. oEmbed supports videos, images, text and other content types.

oEmbed is a protocol that makes it possible to request HTML from an application. Via a simple, standardized API, you can see how to retrieve content from every platform that oEmbed supports.

How oEmbed works is simple: you call a URL and you get back XML or JSON. The XML or JSON contains, among a whole set of other data, the title, author and the source URL. The XML or JSON also contains HTML which is used to format the content.