Many who use WordPress know it is not possible to embed YouTube videos or Google Maps natively into a WordPress post. WordPress strips all non-standard XHTML from a post or page, which means the embed code provided by many media sites like YouTube gets removed when the post or page is saved. To skirt this issue we installed a number of plugins, Anarchy Media Player and Google Maps Quicktag – MU for instance, to provide us this ability in our WordPress MU installation.

However, as I was dorking around tonight with some of the widgets on this site and I discovered I could embed YouTube videos and a Flickr slideshow directly into the Text widget using the embed coded provided to me from these sites. WordPress must not be validating the code in this widget, which is why it must work.

Strange, but I’ll take it.