WordPress offers an “oEmbed” service for a number of external services. If you’re not familiar with this, then it offers an easy way to embed external content into your posts and pages, without having to mess around finding embed code, pasting it in, and hoping the important bits don’t get stripped out.

Instead, WordPress’ oEmbed support allows you to simply paste in the URL to the page from your browser, and WordPress does all of the hard work contacting the provider and agreeing how they can embed it.

I wanted to use this to embed a summary of a GitHub repository, but unfortunately GitHub doesn’t support oEmbed – although they do have a fairly simple API that can be used to retrieve information about the repository.

I could have written a shortcode to interrogate the API, but I wondered if I could achieve an oembed style user experience instead. The result is the Github Embed plugin which is available from WordPress.org. The plugin allows you simply to paste in the URL to either a GitHub profile, or a repository, and have information embedded into your post automatically.

As you might expect, the plugin is also hosted on GitHub, and is embedded below …

It needs a bit of UI love, and pretty sure it can show some more useful information, but it’s usable now.