Add embed support for thinglink

[peterchester]

I've tried it out and it appears that thing links embed support is pretty straightforward. All we need is to add it to the list of providers.

[peterchester]

Diff file to support thinglink oembed.

[peterchester]

I've tested this with an http and https example.

​http://www.thinglink.com/scene/236088193932328962
​https://www.thinglink.com/scene/236088193932328962

[ocean90]

Can you please answer the questions from ​https://make.wordpress.org/core/handbook/design-decisions/#whitelisting-oembed-providers?

[peterchester]

Excellent questions! I'll ask thinglink to speak to that themselves. I'm passing this on to them now.

[Janne Jalkanen]

Hi!

I am Janne, the CTO over at Thinglink. To describe us a bit:

We are the leading provider of interactive images. We have existed for over four years now, so we're not exactly a nascent service. At the writing of this, we are among the Alexa top 16,000 web sites (​http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/thinglink.com) and serve about 700M API calls/month.

We have a Wordpress plugin already in existence (​http://wordpress.org/plugins/thinglink/) which has had over 10k downloads. We're quite often badgered by our customers to get the plugin accepted into wordpress.com, and have a few WP VIP customers who are using it.

We have large, established customers such as The New York Magazine, CBSi, The Home Depot, Microsoft, and Forbes. We are also being used quite extensively in the education space (take a look at the twitter stream at ​https://twitter.com/search?q=thinglink&src=typd to see how people are using us).

Our OEmbed endpoint has been stable for the past couple of years and is officially supported as a part of our API through OEmbed discovery. It would be awesome to have this as a part of WP.

And, yes, we do have a Wikipedia article :-). ​https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinglink

In case of further questions, I'd be glad to provide more info!

[peterchester]

Well there we have it. Thanks Janne!

Dominik? Thoughts?

Oh, one other thing, I marked this as available since 4.0 in the code but i'm assuming this is not in time for the 4.0 release. Should I update that to 4.1? Or just not worry about it?

[peterchester]

Hi folks, any chance we can get this into 4.1?

[wonderboymusic]

What is the SSL situation here? See #28507

[peterchester]

Replying to wonderboymusic:

What is the SSL situation here? See #28507

I'm not sure what you mean by the SSL situation. You can enter SSL or non-SSL thinglink urls and they both work. Is that what you're asking?

Thanks Scott!

[Janne Jalkanen]

Thinglink supports both SSL and non-SSL version of the embed (just use https where you would use http; or better yet, use protocol-relative addressing), though the OEmbed spec doesn't say squat about SSL so I'm unsure how that should be handled.

Though if preferred, we can start serving OEmbed through SSL completely too (so that our embeds are always SSL, regardless of whether you query SSL or non-SSL API).

[peterchester]

Replying to wonderboymusic:

What is the SSL situation here? See #28507

Hi Scott, any update on what we should be doing here? I'm not sure what you're asking for.

[johnbillion]

I'm moving this to the next major release milestone for review (as we tend to do for requests for oEmbed provider support).

As per the ​whitelsiting oEmbed providers checklist, it's important that oEmbed providers are well established and can be trusted in the long term. I'd hate to add support for an oEmbed provider, only for the service to go bust in six months time and have to be removed.

ThingLink does appear to be quite popular, but I'm not convinced that it's established enough or mainstream enough to be included in core. Both of those metrics are subjective, of course, and I'm open to being persuaded. My concern is that we could probably come up with dozens of online services which have been around for four or five years and have several hundred thousand users. I don't think ThingLink is exceptional enough in that regard.

[ahansson89]

I agree with you @johnbillion. It is not up to WP to promote businesses by adding oEmbed support if the majority of the WP users will never use it.

Adding the oEmbed support in a separate plugin for the plugin repo seems like a better idea for ThingLink.