The WordPress Plugin Directory has over 56K plugins, many of them have entire eco-systems built around them with solid business models. Up until now you could not simply link to the plugin page or add additional visual presentation, but nothing more. But now you can easily “oEmbed” plugin URLs to present a visual representation of the plugin.
How It made possible?
WordPress 4.4 (Clifford), released in December 2015, added the oEmbed functionality to all WordPress content. This feature makes all WordPress posts and pages embeddable by simply pasting URLs into the WordPress editor, making WordPress auto-display the preview of the pasted URL. Behind the scenes, each site can customize its embedded output, by adding the new embed.php file into the active theme’s folder.
When the WordPress Plugin Directory was upgraded to version 3, the bbPress-based system was dropped in favor of the upgraded WordPress system, built with Post Types and all the other builtin-features available in core, including the oEmbed functionality.
By the end on July 2018, the plugin repository added oEmbed support to plugin pages using custom embed.php file allowing everybody to auto embed plugin pages using the corresponding URL.
Plugin oEmbed Preview
The embedded preview displays basic plugin data, for example embedding the Akismet URL (https://wordpress.org/plugins/akismet/) will output:
That’s a welcome enhancement to the plugin directory service. It shows the plugin logo, title, author, reviews count, short description , download link, and the latest WordPress version the plugin was tested with.
