A few hours back we told you about a new feature in WordPress 2.9 called oEmbed, which allows you to embed videos, images and polls into posts by just adding the URL to the post. However, not many of you might want this feature and want to disable this.

By default oEmbed is enabled in WordPress 2.9, to disable it visit the Settings > Mediapage and uncheck the boxes in the Embeds settings. To enable oEmbed, just visit the same setting page and check the boxes under Embeds settings.

oEmbed is a really useful feature in WordPress 2.9, however traditional WordPress installations have disallowed users from embedding videos for authors and contributors. Disabling oEmbed will help you restrict authors and contributors from adding videos to their posts.

WordPress 2.9 supports oEmbed, a new feature which fetches information from video and image providers with just the help of the URL. Starting with WordPress 2.9, you do not need to add the embed codes into your post and can just include the video using the URL.

Here is a step by step tutorial on how you can embed videos, images and polls in WordPress using URLs, rather than having to copy and paste the full embed codes, this will ensure that users who do not have support for unfiltered HTML will be able to insert videos into WordPress posts.

Insert Videos in WordPress using URL

Step 1: Create a new post in WordPress.

Step 2: Go to YouTube or to any other supported oEmbed providers in WordPress 2.9 and copy the URL of the video or image you want to include in your post.

Step 3: Paste the URL of the video directly into the post, make sure it is not hyperlinked. Save or publish the post as usual.

You will only see a URL inserted into the post edit area, but that is fine as all the magic happens under the hood, so after you have inserted the video, visit the post and the video will automatically be embedded into WordPress.

If you view the source of the page, you will see that the URL has been converted into an actual embed code using oEmbed technology. Super cool right :-). You can also insert images and polls using the same method.

The supported providers for oEmbed inserts include, YouTube, Vimeo, DailyMotion, blip.tv, Flickr, Viddler, Hulu, Qik, Revision3, Scribd, Photobucket, PollDaddy, Google Video and WordPress.tv.

WordPress 2.8 is out, however lots of users are facing problems with the new installations, if you are someone who is facing problems and looking for a way to downgrade or uninstall WordPress 2.8 and use WordPress 2.7.1.

Here are the steps to downgrade WordPress 2.8 to WordPress 2.7.1, I assume that you have backups of your database with you, without the database backup do not downgrade.

Note: I am providing these instructions for your reference, I take no liability if something goes wrong with your downgrade.

Most of the problems happening in installs in WordPress 2.8 is because of incompatible plugins and themes, please make sure you switch to the default theme and disable all plugins to see if it solves your problem before you make a decision to downgrade.

The downgrade process may take about 30minutes to an hour, so be prepared to have some downtime on your blog.

Step 1: Backup your current database and store it in a safe location, if anything goes wrong you can fall back on it later, here are some instructions on backing up your database, here are some questions with relation to Backing up WordPress.

Step 2: Delete all WordPress 2.8 files, to do this login to your FTP server and delete all files in the WordPress install except for wp-content folder and the wp-config.php file, you may also want to leave out other folders that are not related to WordPress.

Step 3: Download the WordPress 2.7.1 files and extract them to your local drive, upload all the files excluding the wp-content to your FTP server.

Step 4: Delete all the database tables in the WordPress database. Please make sure you have backups of your database before you do that.

Step 5: Restore the database backup you have before you upgraded to WordPress 2.8, you can find instructions on restoring your Database.

Step 6: Make sure everything works again and nothing is broken.

That’s it, hopefully this helps users who are seeing problems with their upgrade to WordPress 2.8.