It’s known that WordPress won’t allow users to post flash content on their platform, unless they host their blogs elsewhere. However, there are a few exceptions; WordPress allows you to post *some* flash content, things like YouTube or DailyMotion videos.

What I’ve discovered is that WordPress allows you to post many other kinds of flash content on your blog.wordpress.com blog, including SnackTools widgets like banners and music playlists. You only need Gigya.

Now, there are two approaches, both very simple:

1. Publish flash on WordPress via Gigya sharing widget

How to do it:

• create a banner, slideshow or playlist
• publish it
• click on “Embed code” (free or premium)

from the Gigya sharing widget click on the WordPress icon

• fill the three-field form

Ready! Your flash banner/slideshow/playlist/etc has been automatically posted on your WordPress hosted blog in a new blog post. This method is easy, but can also be frustrating because you probably don’t want a blog post containing only the flash object. Besides, this method works only for services like ours, that support Gigya widgets. So that’s why you should try the second approach.

2.Publish *any* flash object using the Gigya-to-WordPress shortcode

WordPress accepts, among others, YouTube shortcodes. Likewise, it also accepts Gigya shortcodes (that’s how the approach no. 1 actually works). How to do it:

• If you’re using let’s say BannerSnack, download your banner to SWF file
• Host your SWF file somewhere (WordPress won’t allow you to upload SWF files to your media gallery). There are a lot of free file hosting websites
• Go to your blog admin and start editing an article. Instead of using the standard HTML embed code for your flash file, you’ll need to use the Gigya shortcode that looks like this (let’s say you have a 336x280px banner):

[gigya width="336" height="280" src="http://www.example.com/mybanner.swf" ]

This is the simplest code possible, but you can also add various parameters, like clickTag, wmode, bgcolor etc:

[gigya width="336" height="280" src="http://www.example.com/mybanner.swf?clickTag=http://www.example.com/targeturl.html" wmode="transparent" bgcolor="000000" ]

That’s it! You’ve managed to post flash content to your WordPress hosted blog. I’m as excited as you are!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 14th, 2010 at 7:28 am and is filed under BannerSnack, PhotoSnack, PodSnack, SnackTools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.