WordPress Music Plugins

WordPress is an extremely popular website creation tool, and relatively simple to use. Although powerful and flexible in itself, its functionality can be further extended through the use of third-party plugins – and some of these are of particular interest to music blogs…

Keeping Up With Music Technology

If you want to keep up to date with the latest widgets and plugins for your blog (no matter what its topic) then you would be well advised to check out Joseph Pisano’s Mustech. As well as providing plenty of music technology news, he also keeps a keen eye on the latest functionality-expanding plugins for blog platforms – and he recently provided a useful list of plugins for music.

Plug In, Tune In

Amongst the plugins mentioned is the fmTuner, which allows you to include tracks pullled from your Last.fm account. You can also embed a Last.fm playlist player on your site by visiting the Last.fm widget page. Here you will find a few other widgets such as the music taste comparometer shown on the left, which shows your music compatibility with the blog host (if you are logged into your Last.fm account).

Sharing Mp3 Music On Your Blog

The inline media player may be particularly useful if you want to share mp3 files in your posts – when you include a link to an mp3, it automatically creates a small media player with a slider interface.

An alternative to this method would be to use something like the Yahoo player, which involves pasting a single line of Javascript code into your site’s header. Then, every time a music file appears on a page, a small play button will appear beside it – you can see this in action on my music page.

This is the code you need (use opening and closing HTML tag brackets instead of the # here):

#script type="text/javascript" src="http://mediaplayer.yahoo.com/js"##/script#

Other useful music plugins include GigPress, which allows you to share upcoming events, concerts and other dynamic information. The Discography plugin does pretty much what it says on the tin – a handy way of displaying a band’s release history. Check out MusTech for more plugin goodies, and visit Linkdisco for a musician’s guide to creating a search-engine friendly WordPress website.



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