I was quite curious about why the iTeachAK site was behaving differently than the other blogs in terms of transposing a YouTube URL into html embed code as we saw in this Thursday’s morning demo.

My initial hunch on misbehaving plugins was wrong. I did some testing with other blogs having exactly the same plugins, some without, etc.

It turns out that the current crop of plugins we use do not affect WordPress 3.1’s behavior of transposing URLs into embed code. (This feature went in around WordPress 2.9).

The answer lies in one of the blog settings.
Dashboard > Settings > Media > Auto-embeds > Checkbox labeled “When possible embed the media content from a URL directly onto the page. For example: links to Flickr and YouTube.

As sometimes the case is, the WordPress Codex does not always reflect the current state of the software.

One note: this checkbox was turned on by default when I created the new test blogs. At the close of this email I have left the checkbox off in iTeachAK. (feel free to turn it on if you wish).