Musicians need websites. People around the world have found WordPress
to be an easy way to publish their thoughts and ideas. So, why not
musicians?
Maybe you already have a WordPress blog. Maybe you just need a new,
flexible website, but you don't want to reinvent the wheel. Maybe you're
tired of paying someone else to update your website every time you have a
bit of news. Whatever the case, this website is here to provide free tips,
powerful but easy-to-use tools, and professional development and design
help.
Latest News...
December 12, 2008 – 12:43 am
WordPress 2.7 was released yesterday and there are a lot of great changes. I’ve been using the beta for some time now, and I can tell you that I really like the new administration panels. The upgrade has been pretty painless for me, but the new side menus made me push out a new version of my plugins.
Both Gigs Calendar and Discography have been updated for the latest version of WordPress. Before 2.7, the best place for the administration pages for my plugins was under “Manage”. In 2.7, that particular section is gone, so I’ve moved them up into their own section and should appear below “Comments” in the side menu. At some point, I may support the drop down menus that the built in menu items have.
The Gigs Calendar update also contains several important bug fixes that had not been in a previous release.
Good luck upgrading!
August 13, 2008 – 11:53 pm
I’ve added an option to the plugin to let you use the lightweight Delicious “playtagger” player on your site. This will be much faster than the default flash player, but will make it much easier for people to download your music. If this is undesirable, stick with the default one.
As always, the new version is up for download on the WordPress.org plugin page.
August 9, 2008 – 11:38 pm
When I was originally hacking this plugin together, I wasn’t sure how to find the address of a page within WordPress, so I had a really dumb solution to get it. Long story short, custom permalink structures simply wouldn’t work with this plugin. That is no longer true! Yay!
Also, I fixed the issue that put a slash before apostrophes in the page titles.
August 7, 2008 – 12:02 am
I’ve just put up a bug fix release for Gigs Calendar. The most important fix is that your settings page should function normally now. Hurrah! Also, if you set it so that users other than your editors could access the gigs calendar, that should be working as expected now.
If your gig is not created for whatever reason (except browser compatibility) it should pop up with a little error message with a few more details. Please don’t hesitate sending me that information if it looks like it’d be helpful in explaining your problem.
I’ve got a list of bugs for future bug fixes, but those will have to wait for the next version. I wanted to get the settings page fix out as soon as possible.
So far I’ve been unable to duplicate the problem with the Gigs Calendar settings page that so many people have reported. If the problem I describe below is the problem that you’re experiencing (and you’re using 0.4.0), leave a comment or send me feedback from the plugin if you’d be willing to help me track down the bug.
The problem that I’ve been hearing is that on upgrading to 0.4.0 or installing it fresh, you save your options. After that, the “Settings” page disappears from the list of tabs from the page. You are unable, even on your main “admin” account to access the settings page. You might be able to create a new administrator account and get to the settings that way, but the main admin account still can’t get to it.
I somehow completely mangled the settings page in Discography 1.3. This release has a fix for that.
I finally put out an update for my Discography plugin. I fixed a couple of minor bugs and replaced the flash player. The new player is way less crappy, but just as free. I’ve got some back end structural changes planned for 0.2. If you have any ideas for features that you need/want to see, let me know.
Update: This version has a totally broken settings page. I’ll be putting out a fix very soon. Don’t save your settings if you upgrade to this version.
I’ve just released a new WordPress plugin. If you use Flickr and want to incorporate the photos into your blog, this is a great way to do it. I’m going to be entering the plugin in the WordPress plugin competition tonight (the voting starts tomorrow) so any feedback I can get soon would be fantastic.
Flickr Gallery
I know it’s not strictly music related, but I know that many bands use Flickr, so hopefully this plugin is useful too.
With the new version of Gigs Calendar, there is a setting that only allows administrative users of the blog access to the settings page. For some reason, I made that setting on by default. I’ll change that for the next release, but if you’re having a hard time getting into the settings page in Gigs Calendar all of a sudden, you may need to log in as your blog’s administrive account.
I’ve just pushed out the new version of Gigs Calendar. It is available on the official download page. Please report any bugs you find, even if you know they existed in 0.3.3.
New Features
- WordPress 2.6 compatibility
- New plugin API to allow for greater customization. With this, I (and others) can create one-off customizations of the plugin without having to worry about the changes breaking when I release a new version.
- RSS Feed for Gigs (iCal coming soon, probably in 0.5)
- Set permission levels for users accessing the plugin.
- Interface for using a post’s custom data fields.
- A new widget to display details on the next gig.
Those are the biggies. In the next few days, I’ll put up a plugin to demonstrate the API and custom fields functionality.
