Twitter launches WordPress plugin to get publishers to embed more Vines in stories

Twitter really wants publishers to embed Vines (its short, looping videos) into their sites, so today it released a WordPress plugin that makes it easier to do so.

Built on top of the Vine oEmbed API, the new official Vine plugin for WordPress lets users embed a Vine simply by pasting in the URL. More, from Twitter:

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The plugin automatically adjusts displayed Vine embeds to the content width of your theme. Vine’s embed JavaScript is asynchronously loaded through WordPress’ JavaScript resource manager for improved performance and extensibility.

Twitter also released an oEmbed API endpoint for its Vines, meaning that publishers and developers using a content management system that supports oEmbed “can automatically transform a Vine video URL into Vine’s preferred embed HTML using our oEmbed API endpoints,” the company said. oEmbed is a format for displaying embedded content by posting a link to that content instead of code, and its API enables websites to use this method.

Twitter has long been looking for ways to encourage the sharing and embedding of Vines. A year and a half ago, it made Vines embeddable on any website, with an embed code option appearing alongside the other sharing options on mobile or web.

Twitter is also competing with GIFs and other short-form animated content for space in publishers’ content, so it’s releasing tools that make this inclusion easier and easier.