WordPress is probably one of the most widely used blog scripts in the Internet today and with the growing use of flash videos in the Internet (Youtube, Google Video), integrating both of these can cause a problem. Since WordPress filters out some HTML tags, unless you alter the PHP source script, you will have to use a modification. I took the liberty to create a package that you can easily add to your existing wordpress installation.

  1. Download the WP-FLV Package
  2. Extract the contents of the zip file and upload it to the following location. WordPress Root/wp-content/plug-ins/
  3. Activate the WP-FLV on your WordPress blog.
    In the admin control panel for your blog, click on the Plugins tab on the top and you should see the WP-FLV plugin listed there along with the other plugins. Click Activate the get the plugin working.
  4. Point WP-FLV to the location of the JW FLV Player you uploaded.
    Go to the Settings tab on the admin CP. Now go to WP-FLV in the submenu (right below the tabs on the top). The first text box should ask you for the full url to player.swf. First, type in the root URL for the blog and then add this: “/wp-content/plugins/wp-flv/jwflvplayer/player.swf” (without the quotes). For this blog, it would be http://www.chris-fletcher.com/wp-content/plugins/wp-flv/jwflvplayer/player.swf. After your done, click Update Options on the bottom.

If you followed these steps correctly, the plugin should be ready to be used. Basically, this mod lets you embed FLV files by using a <flv> tag when creating posts. To use the tag, begin writing a new post and switch to the Code view. Now, there are four attributes for this tag. The “height” attribute alters the height of the video and the “width” attribute alters its width. The “href” attribute is where you type in the URL of the FLV you want to embed. And finally, the “autostart” attribute determines whether the video should start automatically or not.

Here are a few examples:

<flv href="http://www.example.com/video.flv" height="320" width="240" autostart="false" />

<flv href="http://www.example.com/video.flv" autostart="false" />

<flv href="http://www.example.com/video.flv" />

The first example used all the attributes, but the second one omitted the dimensions. When this happens, the mod uses the default dimensions (these can be edited in the WP-FLV sub-tab under the Options tab in the admin CP) As per the third example, you can also use the default autostart value, which can also be edited. You can also use the WP-FLV quicktag in the Visual view to help you out.

Here’s an example of how a finished product might look:

First the code:

<flv href="http://lost.blooperblog.net/bloopers/SmokeMonster.flv" height="240" width="320" autostart="false" />

And the actual player (the video is a clip from Lost – Season 1 – Episode 1 showing a mistake made in the CGI):

***The JW FLV Media Player also supports extensions such as SWF, MP3, H.264, JPG, GIF, and PNG, streams, and playlists, you can also use them using WP-FLV. Just replace the href attribute with the desired source.