WordPress: The Missing Manual

Chapter 10. Adding Picture Galleries, Video, and Music

By now, you know that the simplest way to enhance any WordPress post is to toss in a picture or two. The Web is a visual medium, and a bit of eye candy is essential for capturing (and keeping) your readers’ attention.

But modern websites rarely stop with ordinary pictures. Today’s Web is splattered with rich media, including slideshows, video clips, webcasts, podcasts, and song players. In traditional websites, adding these sorts of ingredients is a chore that often requires copying hefty chunks of HTML and JavaScript code—the programming magic that powers many of these goodies. But WordPress makes adding media a lot easier with a small family of useful features, including specialized themes and plug-ins, along with the arcanely named “automatic embeds” and “shortcode” features. Using these tools, you can enrich your posts or pages with rich media almost as easily as you do with ordinary pictures.

In this chapter, you’ll explore all the ways to add rich media to your site. First, you’ll supercharge your pictures by replacing ordinary images with slideshows and galleries, and you’ll learn how to transform your entire site into a photoblog or portfolio. Next, you’ll see how to embed a video window in a post, and how to host your video files on YouTube or your own web server. Finally, you’ll get readers jammin’ with audio tracks and podcasts.

Understanding Embeds and Shortcodes

Before you go any further, you need to know about two ...