My blog.torontomu.ca reference | demo
Testing features, brainstorming
Using the standard image block, I don’t see a real way to add a watermark. You can tint it, add text overtop and an image… but you can’t control where the image appears nor its transparency. I don’t think any of this is useful for creating a watermark (and doesn’t stop someone from right-clicking to get the location of the image to download anyway).
Text can be added
I don’t see any kind of watermarking or overlay option here.
In this post, I will look at adding alt text when uploading images, as well as adding them after they have already been embedded.
Alt text can be added to images in the following ways:
The following two images illustrate what happens if you change or add alt text in the Media Library, after the image has already been added to a post/page.
Most of the time, if you get a message that a Youtube video can’t be embedded, it’s because the content creator did not enable embedding when they released the video on Youtube. By default, this option is not checked.
This process appears to start out alright – but if you try to play the video, you get the message that the video is unavailable.
This is a demonstration of the “video” block in WordPress. It serves a number of purposes, including displaying video uploaded to the blog itself (which we don’t recommend for blog.ryerson.ca) and embedding video hosted on an external site (like Youtube).
This block offers the following main options:
Note that there is no option here to paste in embed code. WordPress doesn’t always work well with embed code, for security reasons. It may strip out portions of the code, rendering it unusable or only partially functional. If a URL-based embed won’t work, you may try to paste the embed code into a Custom HTML block… but be aware that it may not work as expected.
Our blog.ryerson.ca network has a limited amount of space, spread across many blogs. As such, we limit each blog to a certain amount of space. Video files can take up quite a lot of space – and most are larger than the 2MB per file limit.
Instead, we recommend uploading videos to external video streaming and hosting services, then embedding them in your blog post/page.
Other pages on this site demonstrate ways to embed video content from Google Drive (which is a Ryerson-supported solution), Youtube and other sources.
We try a few different ways of embedding Youtube videos, with varying degrees of success.
Youtube is one of the most common media types that the students embed into their blogs (although, as we get more embeddable things, this may change).
Here are a few tests.
I just wanted to include the link to the video I’m using, and the only way I could do it was to use a preformatted block! LOL.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-17TliuArs8
This is actually really easy to use, because you don’t even have to select the Youtube embed block – or any block, for that matter. Just hit enter, to start a new block, and paste in the URL of the Youtube video. When you hit enter, WordPress will know that it is a Youtube URL and create a Youtube embed block out of it. Neat!
Note that some Youtube creators do not permit embedding on an external website – this is their choice, and not a problem with WordPress
This may or may not work for blog admins. Since this is inconsistent, I don’t recommend using this method for Youtube – especially when there is a better available option (above).
As a super admin, I can post the embed code and it will work – but blog admins, authors, etc. will have their code stripped by WordPress, for security purposes.
Here is the original embed code copied from Youtube:
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/-17TliuArs8" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen>
I first added it using a “Super Admin” account, and it worked fine (with fullscreen options)
Next, I tried using a “Blog Administrator” account. Not only was the code stripped for the new video (below) BUT it stripped the code of the above video. Both play, but the fullscreen option does not work.
This is what the stripped code looks like:
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/-17TliuArs8" frameborder="0">
This post is mostly here so I can test commenting.
Comparing the gallery block that comes with WordPress and the NextGen gallery plugin options.
The native gallery block doesn’t give you a lightbox navigation option, like you see with NextGen below.
This is just a comparison of the basic gallery in NextGen with the native gallery. For more info on NextGen options, see this page: https://reference01.blog.ryerson.ca/2019/08/19/nextgen-gallery-plugin/
Here is some info about what the Contributor role has access to. This isn’t complete — I am adding details as I go.
Also see: https://wordpress.org/support/article/roles-and-capabilities/#contributor
| Contributor CAN | Contributor CANNOT |
| Add new posts | See other posts created by other users Publish own posts |
| Upload files (including images) | |
| Visit the blog (front-end) | |
| Access the Dashboard (back-end) | |
| Modify the blog appearance and settings. |
4. I think the administrator is supposed to get an email. Let’s see.
Testing the upcoming Navigation Block.
201912 – This block is currently only available in the Gutenberg plugin and has not yet been rolled into WP core.
I was hoping that this block would also be able to create a TOC for a page based on headings in the page itself (anchor links). Clearly, that’s a separate item — this block is meant to move toward using blocks for all page and interface building needs (including the top menu).
So… with that in mind, I think this block also needs to have a vertical orientation option, for appearing in sidebars. I’m not loving the options, at the moment.
None of the colour styles I’ve tried actually appear to do anything. Not sure if it has to do with this theme or not.
This post will explore the ability to embed video files that are stored directly in your WordPress blog.
Note: we don’t actually recommend uploading video directly to WordPress, as it takes up precious space. Instead, please consider uploading to an external site like Google Drive or Youtube and simply embed in your blog. There are posts elsewhere on this blog demonstrating these options.
MOV files can be useful for podcasting. I don’t think you can podcast using MP4 files.
