The Wordpress.org plugin directory contains 6,889 plugins as of today, October 13, 2009. Nearly 55 million plugin downloads have gone through the Wordpress system. With that many choices available, how is one to know which are the best for their blog, and which are beat? Everyone wants plugins that will help boost their blog in the search engines, plugins that will allow visitors to easily share the information on the site, and plugins that will make blog navigation and permalinks easy and efficient.

Well, Dandy Randy, you’re in luck. Today I’ve put together a list of some of the most popular and most effective plugins for SEO and Networking that will help you get your blog rocking. Of course, the most important part of a blog is the content – but the right content paired with the right tools can be explosive.

1. All in One SEO Pack

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/

The most downloaded plugin available for Wordpress, this little gadget allows you to specify a name, description and exact keywords for every post and page you publish. It is very effective and automatically appends the information to the proper places to get your words spidered. It’s arguably the most important plugin you can have on your Wordpress blog, and if you only use one plugin, it should be this one. A few of the others on this list will duplicate features of this plugin but operate stand-alone – this one encompasses a variety of necessities for any blog.

-

2. Google XML Sitemaps

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/

Those new to the blogging arena might not be aware of the importance of sitemaps. Using Google Webmaster tools, you can create a sitemap to basically tell Google exactly where every page of your site is located, allowing it to efficiently spider your pages and get them into search listings. Webmaster Tools will then present you with information about how your site ranks in the listings, what people are using to find your site and more.

Or, you can use the Google XML Sitemaps plugin to have this happen automatically every time you post, updating your sitemap and sending the information to Google, Ask, MSN and Yahoo. It even has a ton of options on calculating priority, which it can do based on comments, views, or user-defined criteria. Hardcore.

-

3. ShareThis

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/share-this/

ShareThis is a plugin you’ve likely seen all over the place. It’s a one-stop shop for posting a blog entry to dozens of social sites like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Digg, or e-mailing it to a friend. There couldn’t be a simpler way to offer your readers a mode of sharing on their favorite service.

-

4. Ultimate Google Analytics

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ultimate-google-analytics/

If you use Google Analytics as your means of collecting demographic information, like most people do,Ultimate GA is a great plugin. Simply tell it your UA# and it’ll throw the appropriate code into every post you make, allowing you to automatically track the stats on everything you do. It’s all about automation, son.

-

5. SEO Smart Links

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/seo-automatic-links/

Do you ever feel the need to link people from one post to another? Sure you do. SEO Smart Links will help do that for you. If you type a certain key term from one blog post within the text of another blog post, SEO Smart Links will automatically make it a link for you. You can also designate a list of specific terms with specific targets, so any time you type those words it’ll become a link. Settings allow you to control the number of automatic links per post and more. It’s a dandy little tool, I do say. A dandy little tool.

-

6. Twitter For Wordpress

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/twitter-for-wordpress/

Those who use Twitter know that with a solid number of followers, there is often no quicker way to get a bunch of traffic instantly to your blog. A number of Twitter plugins exist for Wordpress, but the simply named Twitter For Wordpress is the most effective one I’ve tried. It’ll automatically create a Tweet when you post, and even has plugin-plugins that will auto-create bit.ly links and do other fancy things. There is also widget support to display your recent public tweets on your blog’s sidebar, though the brand new Twitter Goodies is better for that, with its auto-refreshing widget.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/twitter-goodies/

-

7. WP-DB-Backup

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-db-backup/

I do some web maintenance for a guy who’s Wordpress-based site gets thousands of hits a month. I recently discovered he was never backing up his site, and didn’t know how to go about doing so. If you find yourself fitting that description, whether your site is as heavily trafficked or not, you should be backing up your goods. A hack or server crash that destroys your blog will set you back hours, days, or weeks – and replacing the content can often be impossible. WP-DB-Backup offers a one-click backup that can be stored on your server, downloaded to your machine or emailed to you. Scheduled backups are also possible on a multitude of frequencies so you don’t have to do it yourself. It’s just plain smart to do.

-

8. WP-Email, WP-Print, WP-PostRatings, WP-PostViews, WP-UserOnline

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-email/ – search the rest yourself, lazy bum.

These plugins are all by the same developer and add a level of interactivity to your blog. If you get a lot of traffic, why not show it off? People like to be in groups, and WP-UserOnline will show them how many other people are at the site. WP-PostViews and PostRatings will allow community members to see others’ feelings about a post, and which posts are most popular. Print and Email do what you’d imagine, and make easy to access printer-friendly versions of your posts available for those wishing to share them with others via digital or hard copy.

-

9. SEO Slugs

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/seo-slugs/

So you’ve got a great permalink structure figured out that shows the title of your post and category in the URL. You don’t want to ruin it by having the URL include silly little words like “a,” “and,” “it” and “the.” This plugin will make it so those words are ignored when creating your post’s URL, because quite frankly, search engines don’t like those little words. You can also create a list of other words you want ignored if you choose.

-

10. Permalink Redirect

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/permalink-redirect/

If you haven’t set a custom permalink structure on your blog, you might want to. Creating a post with the title “Top 10 Chicken Restaurants” will normally create a post URL that simply ends with “/?p=124” or something uncreative like that. Put your URLs to work for you in the SEO department by having them pull in the words in your post title.

To do so, navigate to Permalinks in your Wordpress dashboard. On that page, select the “Custom Structure” option. In the box, type something like “/%category%/%postname%/” minus the quotes. This will use your category and name of the post for the URL instead of the default, which is simply the post number. Now when you post “Top 10 Chicken Restaurants” in category “Dining,” your url will be “/dining/top-10-chicken-restaurants/”

Before you click the save button, install the Permalink Redirect plugin. This plugin will reply a 301 permanent redirect if anything requests one of your old URLs, taking it to the new one, and ensures each URL remains unique. It also makes it so you can do this without editing your .htaccess file. This URL structure is much more SEO-friendly than jibberish.

-

11. Robots Meta

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/robots-meta/

You don’t want search engines crawling every single page of your blog. There are a lot more pages than you think, and it’s not ideal to have every page crawled because it results in duplicate content being indexed. That’s a bad thing and can count against your search engine ranking. This plugin lets you specify which areas should be crawled and which shouldn’t, letting you choose the content that gets indexed. It’s literally the only easy way to add meta robots tags to Wordpress pages.

-

12. Nofollow Case By Case

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/nofollow-case-by-case/

You can add the “nofollow” command from your comments and apply it to particular comments, authors or strip trackbacks and pingbacks. You can also automatically set all links to open in a new window.

-

13. SEO Friendly Images

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/seo-image/

With image searching constantly growing, more and more people make their way to blogs via the images. This allows you to easily add alt and title tags to your images and get them indexed properly by the search engines. It’s all about the indexing, Jeeves.

Use some of these plugins and your Wordpress blog will be all set to draw traffic and easily network your posts with others. Then it’s just up to you to write something worth reading.

Premium Directory WordPress theme is the perfect CMS solution be it for your video, music, photos, website or blog directory. Everything within this script is customizable to suit your needs, via widgets, custom color to header graphics. Also the theme is SEO friendly and the file-size is small, thus your site is ensure of a fast loading time.

Key Features
Last tested on v2.7.1.
Threaded Comments.
Widget & Gravatar ready.
Customizable & SEO Friendly.
Compliant & tested on all browsers.

Provided Plugins
Popular Post – Customizable popular post.
Post Ratings – Lets users to rate and vote.
Pagebar2 – Intuitive WordPress navigation.
Post Thumb – Auto generation of your photos.
Download Monitor – A downloads/counter database script.

AdSense Ready
160×90 Links
468×15 Links
728×90 Banner
300×250 Banner
336×280 Banner

Quote:

http://letitbit.net/download/6764.6d0486b5ec8e8412e31ca11b0/premium_directory.zip.html
http://up-file.com/download/7720.f7322be992caa026180fee39e
http://hotfile.com/dl/15110323/d0bce04/premium-directory.zip.html

Source

SEO

HeadSpace2 SEO

HeadSpace2 is an all-in-one meta-data manager that allows you to fine-tune the SEO potential of your site. The is by far the best SEO plugin I’ve seen for WordPress. Makes it easy to manage meta data across the entire site or for specific pages/posts.

Redirection

Redirection is a WordPress plugin to manage 301 redirections, keep track of 404 errors, and generally tidy up any loose ends your site may have. This is particularly useful if you are migrating pages from an old website, or are changing the directory of your WordPress installation.

Image Editing

Scissors

This plugin adds cropping, resizing, and rotating functionality to Wordpress’ image upload and management dialogs. Scissors also allows automatic resizing of images when they are uploaded and supports automatic and manual watermarking of images.

Contact Forms

Contact Form 7

Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.

MM-Forms

MM- Forms is the easiest form builder I’ve come across in the WordPress Plugin directory. It’s simplicity is no testament to how powerful it actually is which makes it the perfect add-on for any WordPress blog.

Search

Relevanssi

Relevanssi replaces the basic WordPress search with a partial-match search that sorts the results based on relevance. It is a partial match search, so if user inputs several search terms, the search will find all documents that match even one term, ranking highest those documents that match all search terms.

Search Everything

Search Everything expands WordPress’s built in search functionality to also include tags, categories, revisions, images, attachments and more.

Admin Enhancements

Custom Admin Branding

The Custom Admin Branding Plugin allows you to re-brand the Wordpress login screen, the admin header and footer with your own custom images.

MailPress

With this plugin you will be able to send beautiful and styled html and plain text mails based on dedicated themes and templates for any e-mail notification issued.

WP e-Commerce

The WP e-Commerce shopping cart plugin for WordPress is an elegant easy to use fully featured shopping cart application suitable for selling your products, services, and or fees online.

Events Calendar

Events-Calendar is a versatile replacement for the original calendar included with WordPress adding many useful functions to keep track of your events. The plugin has an easy to use admin section that displays a big readable calendar and lets you add and delete events.

Magic Fields

Magic Fields allows you to create new “write fields” as the author calls them. This basically means you can create additional types of content like pages, posts and links.

WP-CMS

WP-CMS is a plugin for Wordpress that changes the functionality of the Wordpress admin backend to act more like a CMS. The blog functionality becomes optional and the focus is on writing pages to make Wordpress as user friendly for you and your clients as possible.

WordPress Admin Quick Menu

This simple WordPress plugin allows users to add quick menu items to the WordPress sidebar. It’s designed to help webmasters have easy access to external pages such as Analytics and shopping carts in their WordPress admin panel.

User Management

Role Scoper

Role Scoper is a comprehensive access control solution, giving you CMS-like control of reading and editing permissions. Assign restrictions and roles to specific pages, posts or categories.

User Access Manager

With the “User Access Manager”-plugin you can manage the access to your posts, pages and files. You only create a user group, put registered users to this and set up the rights for this group. From now on the post/page is only accessible and writable for the specified group. This plugin is useful if you need a member area or a private section at your blog or you want that other people can write at your blog but not everywhere.

Content Enhancements

TinyMCE Advanced

This plugin adds 15 plugins to TinyMCE: Advanced hr, Advanced Image, Advanced Link, Context Menu, Emotions (Smilies), Date and Time, IESpell, Layer, Nonbreaking, Print, Search and Replace, Style, Table, Visual Characters and XHTML Extras

WP-CMS Post Control

WP-CMS Post Control builds upon the new controls in WordPress 2.7 to give you complete control over your write options. It not only allows you to hides unwanted items like custom fields, trackbacks, revisions etc. but also gives you a whole lot more control over how WordPress deals with creating content! This helps you use WordPress more like a CMS, alowing you to totally customise what your authors see and us

More Fields

More Fields is a WordPress plugin that adds boxes to the Write/Edit page. These boxes contains input fields, so that additional (more) fields can be added to a post. For example, if you write about books, you can add a box where you can enter title and author, etc. The boxes can be placed either to the right or to the left on the Write/Edit page.

Side Content

Side Content enables you to define a set of widgets which are effectively placeholders. Each one is empty until you assign content to it when editing a page. This enables you to extend the content of the page into the sidebar

Page Blocks

The Page Blocks plugin extends your WordPress pages by combining the dynamic content of widgets with the static content of pages. Up to four “blocks” can be added to each page (two above and two below the page’s content), and widgets can be added to each block in the same way they are added to sidebars

Page/Post Management

My Page Order

My Page Order allows you to set the order of pages through a drag and drop interface.

Dashboard Pages

Rather than have a majority of the dashboard widgets focused on new blog posts and comments it puts the sites page listing front and center in the dashboard for easier and quicker content management.

pageMash

Customise the order your pages are listed in and manage the parent structure with this simple ajax drag-and-drop administrative interface with an option to toggle the page to be hidden from output. Great tool to quickly re-arrange your page menus.

Navigation

Wordpress Navigation List Plugin NAVT

The plugin gives you the ability to create unique site navigation from your pages, categories and users using a Drag ‘n Drop Interface; arrange the items within a group in any arbitrary order. Navigation groups may be composed of any combination of pages, categories, Authors, (Editors, Contributors, Subscribers), internal/external links and list dividers.

Multi-level Navigation Plugin

Adds an SEO friendly, accessible dropdown/flyout/slider menu to your WordPress blog

Core Enhancements

WP Super Cache

This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.

Assorted CMS Solutions

WPML Multilingual CMS

WPML makes it possible to turn WordPress blogs multilingual in a few minutes with no knowledge of PHP or WordPress. Its advanced features allow professional web developers to build full multilingual websites.

Pods CMS

Pods is a CMS framework that lets you create, manage, and display your own content types. Don’t bother hacking blog posts into becoming something they’re not. With Pods, create entirely new data structures with only the fields you need. Like Drupal CCK, you can set up relationships, allowing for a whole new level of interconnectedness.

Flutter

Flutter is a feature rich WordPress CMS plugin that focuses on easy templating for the developer and simplifies content management for the admin by creating custom write panels that can be fully customized (radio buttons, file uploads, image uploads, checkboxes, etc).

Ryans Simple CMS

Converts your WordPress admin panel into a simple CMS. This is aimed at web designers who want to provide a simple administration panel for their clients to update basic static websites.

There are only a couple of plugins out there for automatic sitemap generation on Wordpress, that really serves the purpose. While generating a sitemap is not that all a big deal, setting it right with the right options does make a nig difference to your SEO scores. Not everyone is aware of the right settings for a sitemap, many still thinks that adding a sitemap is enough to take care of things.

Let me try and explain to you what could be possibly the right settings for generating a sitemap for your WordPress blog, and why its essential.

Today among all the sitemap generator plugins for WordPress we have, the Dagon Design Sitemap Generator Plugin is the best one available (For HTML sitemaps), because it has more control over sitemap generation and it helps us to trim down the sitemap to an effective one devoid of the frills. And Google Sitemap Generator by Arne Brachchold for XML sitemaps.

Some things to keep in mind before generating a sitemap

- A sitemap is like a route-map to the search bots. It doesn’t mean that you have to put in everything that you have on your website on a sitemap.
- Search bots will find links to your pages and will anyway crawl them, even without a sitemap (sometimes), so when you have a sitemap, make sure you add some value to it by adding in some additional info.
- Sitemap doesn’t mean a huge set of links on an HTML page, its an XML file often found at the root folder.
- Once you have a sitemap, make sure you let the crawlers know about it, either through the Webmaster console or the Robots.txt.
- Not listing a post/article on the sitemap will not make the crawlers stay away from it.

Making the right settings for the Google WordPress sitemap plugin

Here is an example of optimum setting for the Google sitemap generator.

1. Uncheck the – Add sitemap URL to robots.txt

If this is checked, the plugin will rewrite your existing robots.txt or create problems with it if its already existing. Uncheck this and add the following syntax to your Robots.txt

Sitemap: http://www.yourblogurlhere.com/sitemap.xml

2. Always check the template URL.

The sitemap generator follows a template which is by default in the plugin directory. If you have made changes to the plugin directory name/moved it, this will not function properly. So while checking the “default” option, make sure the path is right, or else you will get a broken sitemap.

3. Uncheck the MySQL standard mode unless absolutely necessary

This if checked will take a lot of memory on your server, so uncheck it unless you have MySQL errors showing up on the sitemap.

4. Limit the number of posts in sitemap

The maximum number of files that can be listed on a sitemap is 50,000 beyond which you have to split up the sitemap and use a “mother sitemap” to link to the “satellite sitemaps”. So unless you have a very large website with lots of pages (above 50k), leave it as such.

5. In Building mode, check rebuild sitemap, if you make changes to the contents of your blog

This will ensure that every time you post/edit a new article, a new sitemap will be generated.

Location of the Sitemap file and Post Priorities

As seen in the above image, check the “Do not use automatic priority calculation”. We will give the priorities for the sitemap contents in the next step.

Also, the location for the sitemap should be the root folder ex:- yourblog.com/sitemap.xml

Click on automatic detection and give the file name as “sitemap.xml”. Using a custom location will complicate things.

Setting Content Priorities for the Sitemap

In the priorities box, set the maximum priority for homepage > followed by posts and pages > then equal priority for all other contents like category and tags.

1 means high priority and lesser values lesser priorities.

Having a higher priority will suggest the crawlers to index those files more often with more importance. However this might get over ridden by incoming link value.

Setting crawling Frequencies for the sitemap contents

In the change frequencies box, make sure that all the values are according to your normal change rates. If you have a weekly posting cycle, change the posts to “Weekly” and if you have a daily cycle, change it to “Daily”. The idea is to give a hint to the search crawlers as to when the content on the site will be changed and what will be changed frequently. But this too will be overridden by the crawlers own judgement, so this setting is only a hint.

That should wrap up some basic sitemap settings, make sure you check your sitemap is fully working and not broken. If it is, the first thing to do is change the settings back to default and rebuild the sitemap.

WordPress is a great blogging platform, one of the reasons being the immense community support. It is this community that develops plugins and hacks for WordPress and makes life easier for everyone. In this post, I have compiled 10 of my favorite WordPress hacks. Some of these posts linked to have multiple hacks available, so make sure to check out the other hacks in the page too.

And while you’re at it, please stumble or float this to let more bloggers and designers know about these hacks.

Split category list

BlogohBlog’s post has, among others, a hack to split category list. This is useful when the list is displayed in a sidebar (and you want to save space).

Also see the hack to show your most commented posts in sidebar.

Author bio

Multi-author blogs will find the author bio hack useful. Once the basic code is in place, you can use CSS to style it up.

Exclude ads on specific posts

Many ad management plugins offer this functionality, but if you have hardcoded ads into your theme, you can use the “Hiding ads in posts” hack (instead of switching to a plugin just for this functionality.

Membership directory

WPDesigner has a useful tutorial on creating a few theme files and using plugins to turn WP into a membership directory.

FLIR plugin

23Systems’ free FLIR plugin replaces headings with custom fonts using FLIR technique.

Breadcrumbs plugin

mTekk has a WordPress plugin for breadcrumb navigation.

FeedBurner feedcount PHP code

Hongkiat has the updated PHP code required to display Feedburner feedcount in text (works for any system using PHP). If you have been frustrated by problems with Feedcount plugin, this is a worthy alternative. Note that it requires PHP 5.

Login form overlay

Pro Blog Design features a tutorial on making a login form overlay using a mod of Lightbox.

Automatic Stats plugin

Automatic Blog Stats is a WordPress plugin that gives you shortcodes to embed anywhere in your post and display stats. Most of the common stats like FeedBurner feedcount, post and comment stats, Alexa, Pagerank, Technorati authority and Google/Yahoo/Delicious backlinks count are available.

Twitter bar, random stats

Paul Stamatiou has code snippets required to pull in Twitter status to, and list random stats on your blog, and.

Of course, this is just the tip of the ice berg - there are lots of other useful hacks. Suggest your favorites in comments.

The posts in the Spring Time Test Blog all come from Ezine Articles, a free directory, and are there to demonstrate this theme and because I thought they might enlighten a few of you on some link building techniques.  I know I got a few ideas.

Spring Time Free Wordpress theme is an SEO enhanced theme distributed by Blogging for Noobs with most of the SEO, plugin, and advanced features coded by me,  Bradley Hart.  Spring Time Theme is the culmination of a few years fiddling around with different themes for myself and others.  I would be remiss not to mention that the basic html and css framework of this theme has its origins on other Blogging for Noobs themes derived from the first release of RevolutionTwo’s free open source themes.  Those Revolution themes are no long available for free nor did they have SEO up to my standards, but proper homage must be paid for solid css work.

Features:

• Wordpress 2.7 Functionality ready for threaded comments
• Plugin Ready
• Enhanced SEO
• Ad Ready
• Featured Video Ready
• Full Author Support with Forum
• Several auxiliary page templates
• distinct tag.php category.php and author.php (must download profile pic plugin to use)
• Three widget areas in the sidebar
• Blank logo file in photoshop and .png

Plugins Currently Coded For:

• WP-PageNavi
• Where did they go from here?
• WordPress Related Posts - this and where did they go from here are the two plugins used at the end of every Web Tools Collection post.
• Odiogo Listen Button - Give your blog a voice! Add a “Listen Now” button to your blog so your readers can listen to your posts and download podcasts. Free Sign up. By Odiogo.
• Yoast Breadcrumbs not only provides a breadcrumb path for site navigation it provides an effective SEO linking structure.
• Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form - This powerful yet easy-to-install contact form features exceptional accessibility and usability while still providing extensive anti-spam and anti-exploit security features. A marriage of communication and peace-of-mind. By Mike Cherim and Mike Jolley.
• Tweetbacks - as some people are having problems with the with cron functionality in the latest I suggest using the 1.4.4 version which doesn’t utilize cron.

Current Page Templates

• Archive
• Contact
• Page with Comments - this page
• Sitemap (not the xml sitemap google uses) WP 2.7 has some issues with the coding I have been using it appears.

Special Features:

• Keywords are attached to Post Slug for improved SEO
• Tags are transformed into meta keywords
• Implementation of Google’s new Canonical Link system to avoid duplicate content, no plugin needed.

Notes:

• future plugin integration request was made for Smart 404
• some plugin integration into the functions.php file to reduce errors while editing will be done

See Spring Time Theme in Action  Download:

  Spring Time (101.0 KiB, 2 hits)

Everyone is all about Twitter these days. It’s all anyone was talking about last weekend.

I like Twitter, too, as you know, and what’s totally cool is that since JV Alert, I’ve picked up almost 300 new followers.  Wahoo!

Yesterday, Andrew Devine (@adevine1) posted an awesome tweet about 14 cool Twitter tools from Kenny Hyder. Some of them I’ve not heard about before, and I thought I’d share. Check this out: 14 Tools of Highly Effective Twitter Users

• Ever wonder if you should follow someone or not?
• Check out the plethora of # tags that exist
• Stalk people on Twitter (Follow them incognito.)
• Get some very cool stats about your usage
• Download and Save a copy of your Twitter account
• Get beyond TweetBacks
• Enter yourself in the Twitter Business Directory
• Host your own short URL
• Add your photographs to Twitter easily
• Post to Twitter from your Firefox address bar (I like TwiterFox for that better, really.)
• Post to your Google Calendar by sending direct messages
• Find stats on your Twitter relationships
• Grade yourself as a Tweep
• Schedule and post Tweets

Audio Player 2.0 beta is now available!

Usage

Once installed, this plugin allows you to insert mp3 audio files into your posts and pages. Use the following syntax:

[audio:name_of_mp3_file.mp3]

This code will insert a flash player and will load the file named name_of_mp3_file.mp3 located in your audio files folder. You can store your audio files anywhere in the web root as long as you update the path in the plugin’s options panel. The default is /audio.

You can also use absolute paths to link to files on other servers:

[audio:http://www.somedomain.com/path/to/name_of_mp3_file.mp3]

Audio Player can also play a sequence of audio clips. Use commas to separate the files:

[audio:name_of_mp3_file1.mp3,name_of_mp3_file2.mp3,name_of_mp3_file3.mp3#093;

You can also pre-append and post-append a clip to all your players. Explained in the Podcasting section.

Contents Examples

Default colour scheme

Custom colour scheme

Contents Podcasting

If you are using the player for a podcasting blog, Audio Player has special options just for you.

Enclosures

If you are unsure what an enclosure is, read the definition on Wikipedia. You have 3 options:

• If you set your enclosures manually, Audio Player can insert a player automatically at the end of your posts. Select the Enclosure integration option in the Audio Player options panel.
• If you let WordPress set enclosures automatically (by reading mp3 links in your posts), you can still use the Enclosure integration option.
• You can also use the [audio] syntax but you must use absolute URLs:e.g. http://www.somedomain.com/path/to/name_of_mp3_file.mp3WordPress will automatically detect the file and set the relevant enclosure option for you.

Pre/Post appended clips

You may wish to pre-append or post-append audio clips into your players. To do this, enter the full urls in the relevant section of the options panel. The pre-appended audio will be played before the main audio, and the post-appended will come after. A typical podcasting use-case for this feature is adding a sponsorship message or simple instructions that help casual listeners become subscribers. This will apply to all audio players on your site. Your chosen audio clips should be substantially shorter than your main feature.

Contents RSS Feeds

You have a choice over what to show in your RSS feed:

• A download link: Choose this if you are OK with subscribers downloading the file.
• Nothing: Choose this if you feel that your feed shouldn’t contain any reference to the audio file.
• Custom: Choose this to use your own alternative content for all player instances. You can use this option to tell subscribers that they can listen to the audio file if they read the post on your blog. You can set the content in the options panel.

Go to the options panel to set these options.

Contents The “chipmunk” effect

The Macromedia Flash player has a problem playing files that are encoded at a rate that is not a multiple of 11.025 kHz. This effect is sometimes called the “chipmunk” effect: the file is played at double speed. To avoid this, encode MP3s at 11.025 kHz 22.050 kHz or 44.100 kHz.

Contents Colour scheme

The entire player colour scheme is customisable. Use the Audio Player options panel in your WP admin to set the colour scheme of your player. You can also change the colours per player instance by using runtime options. Here are the colours that you can set:

Contents Runtime options

Use these if you want to use a different colour scheme for a particular player instance. You can also make the player open automatically or loop the loaded clip. You can pass a number of options to a player instance. To do this use the following syntax:

[audio:name_of_mp3_file.mp3|option1=value|option2=value]

Example:

[audio:name_of_mp3_file.mp3|autostart=yes|bgcolor=0x000000]

This will set the main background colour of the player to black and automatically start the player when the page loads.

Contents Installation

1. Extract and upload the files to your plugins folder
   You should end up with this folder structure:
   
2. Create a folder in your blog root (where your wordpress install lives) where you will store all your mp3 files
   I recommend an audio folder in the root of your blog so it doesn’t interfere with your WP install. If you wish to use another folder, remember to change the audio files directory option on your options panel.
3. Activate the plugin in your WP admin
4. Go to Options > Audio Player in the WP admin
   Here, you can choose how you want to use Audio Player and also set the colours to match your site’s design.

Contents Upgrading from 0.x to 1.x

Once installed, the old player is overwritten with the new one and all colour options should be transfered to the new scheme. Some adjusting to the slider and loader bar colours might be necessary.

Contents Upgrade wizard

Audio Player comes with an upgrade wizard. On the options panel, you can find out if a new update is available by clicking the Check for updates button. If an update is available, you will be prompted to open the upgrade wizard. Simply click Upgrade and the wizard will download the latest version and install it for you. Note: The upgrade wizard relies on some PHP functionality that is not available on all server configurations. You host may have disabled these features, in which case the upgrade wizard will be disabled.

Contents Change log

1.2.3 (4 September 2006)

• Added a page background option. Transparent is no longer the only option. Transparent backgrounds can create problems for Firefox and some WordPress themes.

1.2.2 (14 February 2006)

• “replace all mp3 links” now works with uppercase href attribute in <a> tags

1.2.1 (12 February 2006)

• Fixed bug with “replace all mp3 links” option (now supports extra attributes in <a> tags)

1.2 (07 February 2006)

• Added configurable behaviour options: [audio] syntax, enclosure integration and mp3 link replace
• Added configurable RSS alternate content option: insert download link, nothing or custom content
• Amended player to allow for clip sequence playback
• Implemented post/pre append clip feature
• Check for updates and automatic upgrade feature
• Player now closes automatically if you open another one on the same page
• Minor improvements to slider bar appearance
• Fixed a problem with colour options in Flash 6
• Added player preview to colour scheme configurator
• Improved plugn php code syntax

1.0.1 (31 December 2005)

• All text fields now use device fonts (much crisper text rendering, support for many more characters and even smaller player file size)
• General clean up and commenting of source code

1.0 (26 December 2005)

• Player now based on the emff player
• New slimmer design (suggested by Don Bledsoe)
• More colour options
• New slider function to move around the track
• Simple scrolling ID3 tag support for title and artist (thanks to Ari)
• Time display now includes hours for very long tracks
• Support for autostart and loop (suggested by gotjosh)
• Support for custom colours per player instance
• Fixed an issue with rss feeds. Post content in rss feeds now only shows a link to the file rather than the player (thanks to Blair Kitchen)
• Better handling of buffering and file not found errors

0.7.1 beta (29 October 2005)

• MP3 files are no longer pre-loaded (saves on bandwidth if you have multiple players on one page). Thanks go to Craig Leikis for warning me about this one

0.7 beta (24 October 2005)

• Added colour customisation options.

0.6 beta (23 October 2005)

• Fixed bug in flash player: progress bar was not updating properly.

0.5 beta (19 October 2005)

• Moved player.swf to plugins folder
• Default location of audio files is now top-level /audio folder
• Better handling of paths and URIs
• Added support for linking to external files

0.2 beta (19 October 2005)

• Bug fix: the paths to the flash player and the mp3 files didn’t respect the web path option. This caused problems for blogs that don’t live in the root of the domain (eg www.mydomain.com/blog/)

Contents Download

Download audio-player.zip

Wordpress is a very standalone script and everything you need to do is to be done inside. I used to redirect links using cpanel redirection feature but failed to use it with wordpress. I asked Google and finally I found the solution. I stumbled in Adventures in Keyframes and Codes and I found what I was looking for. To further help spread this very useful information, I am republishing the method.

The process is simple. You just need to download a single text file called template-redirect.txt and follow the following process.

1. Download template-redirect.zip and install it in your template directory. Example: public_html > wp-content > themes > your theme director.

2. Log-in to your wordpress admin area (wp-admin) and create a new page. Just type the title you want for that page and type the target URL in the body of the page.

3. Select “Page Redirect” in the page template.

Save the page and you are done.