If you have a blog or manage a WordPress website, you may have published a Facebook post or an embedded Instagram photo in one of your content on more than one occasion. On company pages it is common practice to show visitors content from the company’s corporate channels on these social networks, while in the media it serves to exemplify some content or show the original source of information if it was based on a publication on these social networks.
All Facebook and Instagram embedded content in WordPress will disappear on October 24
However, as of October 24, it will not be possible to embed Facebook or Instagram content on web pages that use WordPress , and this represents an important change for publications that used this type of content.
To be more exact, all the content already published will stop showing from October 24 . Only website administrators with a Facebook developer account and a registered Facebook app will be able to continue embedding content.
In other words, the option is so restricted that most bloggers and web pages do not have the possibility of creating a developer account and a Facebook app, so they will see how the content they had embedded from Facebook will disappear from that date.
Why will this happen? Because Facebook will then launch an update to its API, the Application Programming Interface , which will no longer have support for oEmbed, the standard used to allow embedding content from one web page into another. Thus, from now on you will be required to have a developer account to be able to continue embedding content in WordPress pages.
But since the measure also has a retroactive effect, not only will future publication be prevented, but also all the content that was embedded in the past, copying the HTML code that Facebook itself provided, will remain inaccessible.
This potentially affects millions of web pages around the world and the only solution Facebook offers is to comply with these new and strict rules (create the developer account and launch your own app), which are also not accessible to everyone. world.
Solutions to the change of Facebook and Instagram API
If you can’t create a developer account and a Facebook app, there are a couple of free WordPress plugins you can use to continue displaying Facebook and Instagram content on your WordPress pages.
One of them is Smash Balloon , which has a specific plugin for Instagram and another for Facebook. When installing them, there is no need to register as a Facebook developer or create an app. It is only necessary, once they are installed, to go to the oEmbed menu and click on the connect button.
Another of the plugins available at the moment is oEmbed Plus , although in this case, in addition to installing the plugin, you will also have to create a developer account on Facebook.