There are three ways to add video to your website in BU WordPress.
Using YouTube/BUniverse, you can upload multiple video formats and share them quickly and easily. BUniverse is a curated front-end for YouTube. This option is for public content.
Using MyMedia, you can upload multiple video formats and share them quickly and easily. MyMedia is a BU-licensed cloud platform and is not fully public. Content can be restricted to members of the BU community.
Using your WordPress Media Library, you can upload video files and link to them. Videos uploaded to WordPress do not stream – visitors will experience download delays. This option is only practical for very short clips or loops. Files must be under 100MB.
BUniverse/YouTube
Add your video to YouTube/BUniverse. Give your video a title, description, categories, and tags — categories and tags help relate your video to other similar content and makes searching easier for visitors.- Find the Share tools and click the Embed option.
- Copy the embed code. Refer to the additional embed code parameters for sizing. The default size should fit most BU WordPress pages, however if you need to resize your video, be sure to set the correct width for your embed — the height property will change proportionally to ensure correct aspect ratio. If you don’t know what size your video should be, find the dimensions of a web page element to determine your site’s content column width in pixels.
- Go to your WordPress page editor and switch the editor to Text mode.
- Paste the copied code.
- Accessibility Compliance — Add a title attribute with descriptive text to comply with BU’s Minimum Web Accessibility Standards. After pasting the embed code, manually add a title attribute within the iframe tag (e.g.
<iframe src="[link-url]" title="Interviews with students about afternoons on the BU Beach" ...></iframe>
- Use the Preview Changes button to view your page with the video.
- Note: If you switch back to Visual mode, you’ll see a yellow box indicating where your video will show in your content. WordPress doesn’t display the video in the dashboard/editor for embedded YouTube videos.
- Click Publish/Update to save all changes.
WordPress Media Library
For very short videos that do not require streaming, your WordPress Media Library may be a viable option.
- Upload your video file to your WordPress Media Library.
- You can link to your video file.
- You cannot upload files larger than 100MB.
- Videos in the WP Media Library do not stream — visitors must download the entire file for the video to play.
Legacy instructions: Fix nav drop-downs that appear behind videos
If you are still using an old, pre-responsive WordPress theme and you have encountered a situation where your drop-down nav menus fall behind your video embeds, this *may* fix the situation. This problem is specific to Internet Explorer. The better fix is to contact IS&T to plan to upgrade to a newer, responsive theme.
- Edit the Page that has the problematic video and switch to Text mode in the content editor.
- Find the video code within your HTML. It will usually start with
<object> or <iframe>. Depending on which method you’re using determines which code you’ll use to fix it.
- If you are using
<object> add the following parameter to you code amongst the other parameters: <param name="wmode" value="opaque" />
Adding the additional parameter to the list of other parameters for the object embedded video player.
- If you are using
<iframe> add the following code to the end of the URL reference: ?wmode=opaque
We’ve added ?wmode=opaque to the end of the video link URL.
- Preview your Page before saving to make sure these changes worked.
- Save/Update your Page to make the changes live.
