Embed is broken

Hi @spacena thanks for getting in touch. Sorry to hear you’re having issues with adjusting the size of your Story. To help you further with this could you please share the following:

1. Your Site Health Information which you can share using our private form.
2. Could you share the embed code you’re currently using?
3. Have you tried clearing any cache with any optimization plugins you may be using or through your browser?

Once I have this information from you I can help to advise you on next steps to take with this.

Hey Adam,

1. I shared the info using the form.
2. I am using the built-in feature of the Web Story plugin to embed a story using the link. So not sure if I could share any embed code.
3. I did uninstall one caching plugin.

The height/width thing is working now. I think it started working before I disabled the caching plugin. Not sure what happened there.

That said, I still don’t get the poster thing working. I think in the embed using the link, it’s asking for a poster. When I provide the poster with 900×1200 dimension (3:4 aspect ratio as required by the plugin), it doesn’t show on the frontend. Ideally, the web story should be clickable. When you don’t add a poster, your web story is invalid however, it will still show but won’t be clickable.

Since the poster thing is not working, I don’t see a clickable thumbnail of the web story.

What’s happening here is that when I create a new story, then it goes under the folder: /web-stories/

But when I embed a story in a fresh post, then there is no such folder for that story and it stays on the post page. And hence, it’s not clickable and you are not able to load the story as you would be if it was not an embed.

PS: I could see the poster initially until the story loads completely. I think the story is overriding my submitted poster.

@spacena The /web-stories/ your are referring to is the Web Stories archive page. The Web Stories archive page uses the default archive theme for your website. You could disable the built-in archive and instead refer to a new custom page as the archive. You can then edit this custom archive page using Gutenberg and insert the content you’d like.

To do this you’ll have to navigate to Stories > Settings > Stories Archives and select the custom option. Next, select the page you wish to use and once the settings have been saved you will be able to access that page from the pages section of your site to edit how you wish to display your Stories.

Using the embed function as you are now won’t click through to the Story but the Story will be on your Story archive page also. Does this help to answer your question? Please let me know if there’s anything else I can help with.

Adam, the issue is I don’t find the embedded stories on the archive page. Only the stories that I create on my website are found on the archive page.

Plus, the poster is not working with the embedded stories. Is it because the embedded stories’ links are from 3rd-party websites?

@spacena

Adam, the issue is I don’t find the embedded stories on the archive page. Only the stories that I create on my website are found on the archive page.

That is expected behaviour and only Stories created on that site will display for that sites archive page. It is the archive of the Stories for that given website.

Plus, the poster is not working with the embedded stories. Is it because the embedded stories’ links are from 3rd-party websites?

This is the likely cause yes. Do you see any ‘CORS’ related issues if you check for any console errors?

Is there a particular reason you are embedding a Story from one site onto another? If not then you can also create that Story from the site itself. I appreciate that you may not want to create the same Story again but this would be the best way to do this and avoid any of the issues you have so far run into.

This is the likely cause yes. Do you see any ‘CORS’ related issues if you check for any console errors?

If that’s so, then why was the option to add a poster in an embed given in the first place? Don’t you think if the poster option is given then it should work?

Here’s the screenshot.

@spacena Can you just confirm where you are trying to add the poster image? A screenshot or even recording of this would help to explain the exact issue here so that I can be sure I am giving you the right advice.

You can use Imgur or Loom to do this and share the URLs here.

Here’s loom link: https://www.loom.com/share/9f37f98fa6f54cf9bc5211841d2f7cc2

As you can see I added the poster however it doesn’t show up in the frontend.

Since I am adding the embed on the blog page, its archive page is the blog page. So when I go to the blog page as you can see in the loom recording, there is no clickable thumbnail of the web story. Looks like the poster is not loading or working here.

@spacena Thanks for sharing this I see what you mean now. I see you are using the ‘Single Story’ option for the Stories Gutenberg block. When embedding a single story, the poster is added for accessibility and search engines. It is not displayed to the user and it’s not meant to be displayed visually. So this is the current expected behaviour here.

However, we do have an existing feature request for allowing you to embed a single story by displaying the poster and then the story opens when you click on it. Please feel free to follow that feature request for further updates on this.

Hope this helps.

Thanks for all the help, Adam. Really appreciate it.

So this is resolved for now.

You are very welcome.