Sometimes a plugin or widget you want doesn’t exist, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t put one together yourself. With a little cretivity and persistence I was able to create a WordPress widget where you can both listen to music and vote on multiple songs on the sidebar.
Listen and Vote Widget on TheUrbaneLife.com
Since there isn’t a music plugin that allows you to vote, I took the mp3-jplayer for WordPress and added a star rating plugin to it. The trouble is that the ratings plugins are designed to gather votes on posts and not songs.
My thought was to take a few post ratings and embed them inside iframes on the sidebar. This method only served to drive me crazy. Since only a few posts were to contain ratings, the rating software turned off the feature on all other pages, including the home page where my iframes were. so refrencing these pages from an iframe on a different page only gave me a blank box.
Fortunately, the kkstar plugin allowed me to call multiple ratings on a single page using shortcode. All I had to do was asign each rating to it’s unique post or page for a particular song, then the plugin could keep track of the accumulated votes for each song.
PHP IN A SIDEBAR WIDGET
Having the pieces in place, I just had to put them together on the sidebar with PHP.
Normally your WordPress theme will only support standard text or HTML in its sidebar text widget. You can always edit the sidebar PHP include file, but for easy access and editability right from your admin screen, a widget is the way to go. To put the music and ratings plugins together on the same area of the sidebar, I installed the WP PHP Sidebar widget which allows you to call a plugin’s shortcode by using PHP. Calling the plugins multiple times within the same div, let me style the widget in a cohesive way. See the final results here: http://www.theurbanelife.com/
Looking for Website Design? Please contact the Urbane Way eric@theurbaneway.com
The Urbane Way specializes in social media marketing and PR and lifestyle branding.
Matt Oberdier received his BFA in Illustration from the College of Creative Studies in Detroit in 2008. He has since worked as a freelance graphic designer & web developer.
In his free time, Matt enjoys playing guitar & singing, cooking vegan food, photography and acting.
Matt Oberdier
Matt Oberdier received his BFA in Illustration from the College of Creative Studies in Detroit in 2008. He has since worked as a freelance graphic designer & web developer. In his free time, Matt enjoys playing guitar & singing, cooking vegan food, photography and acting.
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i love music but it depends upon the music i like soft music but people have their choices i appreciate this site