As we’ve begun regularly publishing Hello Dolly and I’ve started running a few podcasts on Yet Another Blogging Podcast, I was finding the process a bit cumbersome for regularly embedding podcasts into our posts.

To be clear, I’ve been using the jQuery plugin by Codrops to embed audio, but it requires that I hop back and forth between the visual and the text editor when drafting posts.

In order to streamline the process a bit, I wrapped the jQuery plugin to make an easy to use WordPress audio player plugin.

A WordPress Audio Player Plugin

WordPress Audio Player Plugin

If you’ve read my blog for any amount of time, you know that I believe in releasing strong 1.0’s – or the absolute minimum viable product possible – and I’ve attempted to do just that with WP Audio Player.

In short, I’ve attempted to keep the functionality as close to native WordPress functionality as possible. The plugin expects:

  • That you’ll be upload the media via the Media Uploader
  • That you’ll be using the URL of the media the WordPress provides after uploading the file

Easy enough, I hope.

How It Works

1. Upload Your Media

First, you upload your media using WordPress’ media uploader. When the process is complete, WordPress will generate a page that includes the URL to the file:

WordPress Audio Player Plugin

Grab the URL from the Media Uploer

From here, you copy the URL from the File URL meta box of the page.

2. Add The Audio Your Post

Next, you can begin drafting your post – or editing your post – and then place the URL to the audio that was provided by the Media Uploader in the meta box that now appears in the sidebar of your edit screen:

WordPress Audio Player Plugin

Adding audio to your post

At far as editing is concerned, this is all that you need to do.

3. Profit!

Once you publish your post, the plugin will add the player as the last item in your content:

WordPress Audio Player Plugin

The audio player embedded in a post.

In the current version, the player will always appear at the bottom of the content so you’ll need to be able to plan for your post to account for that.

Permitting the plugin proves useful, I’ll introduce functionality that makes it easier to place it wherever you’d like to include the player.

Other than that, the audio is ready to play.

Downloading The Plugin

You can grab the plugin from the official WordPress plugin repository.

Again, this plugin is mostly a wrapper for the jQuery plugin by Codrops. Though this version doesn’t include any of the fancier skins, the base functionality works and should make it a bit easier to embed audio in your WordPress site.

As usual, I’m all for comments and feature requests, so please leave them in the comments below.