Recently, I’ve had a couple of projects that require thumbnails for video posts. There are plugins out there to do this, but I wanted a simple, lightweight way. Good news is, this can be achieved very easily by making use of WordPress’s WP_Embed
class.
/**
* Maybe get thumbnail from embed
*
* @param string $string
* @return bool
*/function get_embed_thumbnail_from_string_maybe ($string) {
$found = preg_match_all('|^\s*(https?://[^\s"]+)\s*$|im', $string, $matches);
if (!$found) return false;
// nb: this can be used if we're just checking an embed exists and is supported
//foreach ($matches[1] as $match) if (wp_oembed_get($match)) return $match;
$embed = new WP_oEmbed();
foreach ($matches[1] as $match) {
if ($embed->get_html($match)) {
return $embed->get_data($match)->thumbnail_url;
}
}
return false;
}
Place the code above in a custom functionality class or, for a crude option, dump it in the functions.php
file and call it when a thumbnail of the first video in a string is required. An obvious use case is the blog archive page when displaying thumbnails with each post link.
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