Pageflow::Oembed

This plugin will search for links in your Pageflow stories, and turn them into embedded content when possible. For example, instead of a link to a Tweet URL, people reading your story will see the Tweet embedded in the page.

🌟 Read the introduction on Scrollytelling 🌟

It usually works using oEmbed, the standard protocol for discovering and showing embedded content. Although sometimes we use a JavaScript SDK, since it gives better results. When we do use oEmbed, the embed-code is cached in the database.

The best aspect about this plugin is for editors working with Pageflow. You don't have to do anything out of the ordinary. Continue to add links as normal, using the built-in html editor in Pageflow. Your hand-crafted, artisanal words are not affected by our code. The plain link will be visible to you, dear editor, as always. It's just that on the front end, the link is replaced by embedded content.

If you don't want the embed, remove the link. In a future release there might be a mechanism to deal with this.

🖤 Heads up: contains ~~evil spyware~~ social scripts 👀

To create the best versions of embedded content, we usually include the JavaScript SDK a provider has created. For example, Twitter and Facebook. The embeds sans JS aren't so nice to see, they don't live update the hearts and thumbs and all that, and certainly won't open the respective apps on your phone.

If you hate the thought of being tracked on the interwebs, well, I hear what you're saying but we wanna be pragmatic. Should I make using the SDKs configurable? Why me? It's open source, you do it! Send me a patch!

Whitelisted URLs

We work with a whitelist (actually a regex, hurr durr) and will convert only some links.

Currently supported:

• twitter, single tweet: https://twitter.com/scrollytelling/status/885128273239396352
• spotify, single track: https://open.spotify.com/track/298gs9ATwr2rD9tGYJKlQR
• spotify, artist: https://open.spotify.com/artist/0IIPgITtEO4JJfipw57KGv
• facebook, post: https://www.facebook.com/20531316728/posts/10154009990506729/

Note that the URL you use must look exactly like the ones above. Not exactly, the numbers and things can be different. You know what I mean.

More providers will follow. Want your fave in here? Create an issue!

Just uses JavaScript

No jQuery was created during the development of this plugin. It does mean we have two polyfills to get IE on board. These don't get loaded if your browser is up to date. And if you are using a really ancient browser, well, that's your choice.

Scrollytelling. What's that now?

We are Scrollytelling. We enable online stories. We host stories for national media. We run a custom version of the awesome Pageflow storytelling tool. We continously give back to the community and we hope that you'll enjoy this plugin too.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'pageflow-oembed'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Configuration

Add it to the Pageflow initializer in the host application:

# config/initializers/pageflow.rb
Pageflow.configure do |config|
  config.plugin(Pageflow::Oembed.plugin)
end

Copy the migrations:

rake pageflow_oembed:install:migrations
rake db:migrate SCOPE=pageflow_oembed

Add it to the asset pipeline:

// app/assets/javascript/application.js
//= require pageflow/oembed

Finally, mount it in routes.rb:

Rails.application.routes.draw do
  ...
  mount Pageflow::Oembed::Engine, at: '/oembed'
  ...
end

Usage

In the Pageflow editor, insert a plain old link into the content text. Voila!

🌟 Read the introduction on Scrollytelling 🌟

Development

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake spec to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/scrollytelling/pageflow-oembed. This project is intended to be a safe, welcoming space for collaboration, and contributors are expected to adhere to the Contributor Covenant code of conduct.

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.