TheGarage Tech Blog

I just found out that Wordpress Mu disallows embed tags within blog posts. No YouTube, no Flikr, no nothing. The reason given is security issues, of course. Details here.

On the one hand I can see how if you are allowing people to sign up and create free blogs on the fly you would want to be very careful with what someone is allowed to inject into your database with an embed tag. On the other hand I don’t see how  you are going to get people to use your fancy blogging service when they aren’t allowed to embed YouTube or Flikr  videos. There is an easy enough workaround that has been made even easier packaged as a Wordpress plugin, but, hey, you know I really don’t want people injecting malicious stuff into my database.

I also found out that WordPress Mu disallows the execution of php and javascripts. Again, for a multi-user installation that has hundreds of users this is the only course. But for a semi-closed setup like the one I am working on now, I want the flexibility to do whatever I want. To get dynamic output in the content area of a page you can use a workaround as described here. Inserting the code for an RSS aggregator is discussed but the technique is good for many things.

To inject code directly into a Wordpress Mu post, forget about it. I have a project on the drawing board where I want to use custom fields and have appended to each post a series of dynamically created MySql queries of the custom fields to create tables, charts, etc. For now, the only choice for that is to have a bunch of php pages pre-defined with the queries and then use an ajax-like method to inject the results into a page elements’s innerHTML. Even if all that can be done it’s hardly the definition of dynamic is it? The alternative is to use a stand-alone Wordpress installation and install the exec-php plugin, which is probably what I’ll do.

This entry was posted on February 12, 2009 at 8:54 pm and is filed under Wordpress/Mu. Tagged: hack, wordpress mu. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.