Goodbye YouTube Embed – the end of my WordPress plugin

YouTube Embed was one of my earliest WordPress plugins. But with tight integration of videos in WordPress by default, particularly with the block editor, it’s become less and less relevant. I struggled to find time to continue to maintain it, let alone add in block features.

But, what I didn’t want to do, was just abandon it and leave users not knowing this and, potentially, leaving them open to security issues.

So, back in 2023 I started talking to one of the plugin’s biggest competitors, EmbedPlus.

Unlike my free-only plugin, EmbedPlus has an entire product organisation behind it. A few months later, just over a year ago, we made an agreement and I transferred ownership of my plugin to them, on the understanding that they would add compatibility to their plugin, which they did (and I’ll explain this a little further in a bit). I pinned a support note to say what had happened and updated the plugin’s README to push users to the alternative plugin.

However, although I hoped the new owners may continue to, at least, maintain the existing plugin, a recent security issue with it has gone un-fixed and, as of today, the plugin has been taken down in the directory. I’m not sure how this is going to help persuade continuing users of my plugin to migrate to them, especially as many will be totally unaware that this is happening and will now not even know about the security concern either (which was a scenario I was trying to avoid).

If you’re still using YouTube Embed, I’d recommend removing it. If you don’t use the advanced features, then simply doing this may be enough, as a basic shortcode is supported natively with some of the parameters that my plugin used. For anything more extensive, you may need to look for an alternative. If that’s EmbedPlus then this is how to do it…

Migrating to EmbedPlus

1. Head into the EmbedPlus for YouTube menu
2. Select the “Compatibility” tab
3. Half way down is a “Migrate shortcodes” option
4. Tick this and then “YouTube Embed”
5. Save the changes and you should be all sorted

 Share this post on social media.