There is a new, official WordPress plugin for your Vine videos. I installed it easily, but the next step is finding it and using it. I check the sidebar… not there. I check the toolbar at the post editor… nothing. I check the widgets… not seeing it. I check the editor and see that the code is there. Not for the first time, I think it would be good to have some kind of standard for where to find plugins once they’ve been installed.
I check the website. There is a lot of enthusiastic description of how easy the plugin is to use and so forth, but no actual instructions. I try to use the shortcode. No joy. I copy and paste the example shortcode into the post. It simply doesn’t work.
At this point I feel like the clients who contact us and tell us that things don’t work when they demonstrably do work. I have compassion for this, because machines don’t always do what we expect them to do, and we can’t bribe them with cake or anything.
I try the same process with other websites, because sometimes it’s just incompatibility with your theme. It doesn’t work for me anywhere.
Kinsta has a post cheerfully describing this and other Vine plugins. But Tool Tryout Tuesday is our honest experience of tools, and I’ve got to admit that the plugin simply didn’t work for us at all, so I can’t recommend it.
On the other hand, it is super easy to embed Vine videos using the tools at Vine. Choose the video you want to embed. Click on the Share button and then on the Embed button.
At the Embed page, you can choose between “Simple,” which just embeds the video, and “Postcard,” which shows the Viner’s identity as well. You can also pick a width. Copy the code using CTRL+C or your favorite copying method.
Choose the “Text” editor rather than the visual editor in your post or page and paste the code in with CTRL+V or your favorite pasting method. The entire process takes about 10 seconds.
Sometimes you really don’t need a plugin. If you embed so many Vine videos that going through the embed process is a real bother, go ahead and try the plugin for yourself. Let us know if it’s so great that we should invest some more time into getting it to work properly on our site. In the meantime, this tool is a thumbs down for us.
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