How to disable auto-embeds (oEmbed) in WordPress 3.5

WordPress 3.5 will remove some options from the UI. One of these options is the Embeds section.

autoembed_urls, the on-off checkbox, goes way, and oEmbed is always assumed to be on. The only reason to have a UI on/off for oEmbed is if it was easy to accidentally embed items. But it doesn’t parse every link in the post, just those on their own line or inside an [embed] code.

(Andrew Nacin, Ticket #21719)

With that there is no visible setting anymore, which let’s you disable the auto-embed function. But, WordPress is not WordPress if it doesn’t provide another way to disable it. Here we go.

The embeds are handled by the WP_Embed class. The constructor of the class registers some actions and filters. Also a filter for the_content:

add_filter( 'the_content', array( $this, 'autoembed' ), 8 );

Now we just need to remove the specific filter again. Since we can’t use $this in the remove_filter call we need to use the global variable $wp_embed which includes the reference to the object.

// Disable auto-embeds for WordPress >= v3.5
remove_filter( 'the_content', array( $GLOBALS['wp_embed'], 'autoembed' ), 8 );

You can add this code to an existing plugin or you can use the small plugin “Auto-embeds Disabler”.

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