Stephen (Steve) Withington - Mura Plugins

New Plugin for Mura CMS: MuraMetaGenerator

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 12:48:00 -0700

In honor of Mura's new and improved App Store, I've release another plugin for Mura CMS into the wild called MuraMetaGenerator™. In a nutshell, this allows Mura CMS to auto-generate meta keywords and descriptions for your pages.

Why Should I Use This?

There could be a number of reasons why someone would want to use MuraMetaGenerator™. One of the best reasons is that most Authors and Editors either don't have the time and/or the knowledge of what information to put in these fields to begin with.

Also, since search engines change their algorithms daily and actually rely less and less on meta keywords and meta descriptions, why not spend your time going through the actual content of your pages and making sure your content contains the information you want indexed by search engines? After all, MuraMetaGenerator™ derives its information based on the actual page content which means you'll be following 'White Hat' Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques so your search engines rankings will most likely grow organically over time.

So go ahead and let MuraMetaGenerator™ do it for you! You can grab it from http://www.getmura.com/index.cfm/app-store/apps/murametagenerator/

MuraMediaPlayer Plugin Released for ColdFusion-Powered Mura CMS

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 08:44:00 -0700

I was finally able to finish up my MuraMediaPlayer plugin for Mura CMS. This plugin uses JW Player™, the Internet's most popular and flexible media player. It supports playback of any format the Adobe Flash Player can handle (FLV, MP4, MP3 and AAC). It also supports RTMP, HTTP, live streaming, a wide range of settings and more.

This plugin is available in the Mura CMS App Store under plugins. Since the primary guts of the plugin are driven by my cfMediaPlayer project hosted on RIAForge (a ColdFusion wrapper of the JW Player™), I'm posting a copy of the license here just so there's no confusion.

License

By using MuraMediaPlayer, you agree to the 'non-commercial' license found at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/. For corporate use or if you're planning to generate revenue from your site (e.g., by running advertisements on the page, selling anything, etc.) you will need to buy a license for JW Player™. To obtain a commercial license of the JW Player™, please visit http://longtailvideo.com/players/jw-flv-player/commercial-license/

Installation

Installing the plugin is pretty simple. I've created a brief video tutorial and also included an outline of some simple steps to follow:

Download the plugin from the Mura CMS App Store's plugins section
Note the location of the 'muramediaplayer.zip' file that you downloaded
Log in to your Mura CMS Admin area
Click 'Site Settings' found on the top-right portion of the screen on the yellow bar
Select the 'Plugins' tab
'Browse' to the location of the 'muramediaplayer.zip' file and select it
Click 'Deploy' and the 'Plugin Settings' form should appear
If you want to change the 'Plugin Name,' feel free to do so
You can simply leave the 'Load Priority' alone or change it to anything you want to be if you have other plugins that require loading ahead of it
If you're Mura CMS install is using Amazon S3 for file storage and you've set up an Amazon CloudFront, you can enter the 'Cloud URL.' Otherwise, leave it blank.
If you're Mura CMS install is using Amazon S3 for file storage, you have an Amazon CloudFront set up and you've setup a Streaming Distribution to deliver content to end users in real time, you can enter the 'Streaming URL.' Otherwise, leave it blank.
Under 'Site Assignments,' select the site(s) you wish to enable the plugin to run on.
Click 'Update' when finished.
That's it! You're ready to create MuraMediaPlayer pages and/or use a new [mura] tag method that is now available to you.

Please visit Amazon for more information about their S3 and CloudFront services.

Usage/Instructions

Detailed instructions for using the plugin are available at http://www.getmura.com/index.cfm/app-store/plugins/muramediaplayer/documentation/. In addition, instructions can be found after you install the plugin simply by logging into the Admin area, click 'Plugins' (or go to 'Site Settings', then select 'Plugins' tab), then click the 'MuraMediaPlayer' link.

TwitterTweets: My First Plugin For the ColdFusion-Powered Mura CMS

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 08:08:00 -0700

This is my first attempt at building a Mura CMS plugin, so as you can imagine, this is going to be pretty darn simple. This plugin was actually inspired by a blog post I wrote back in March 2009 about using ColdFusion's CFFeed to display twitter tweets. If you like it ... great! If not, sorry I disappointed you.

The plugin will allow you to display the most recent tweets on your site(s). No knowledge of ColdFusion or programming should be required! However, if you are comfortable with .css, etc.then you'll be happy to know the tweets are displayed within a div id of "twitterTweets" and the tweets themselves are output in an unordered list, so you can style to your heart's content.

If there are tweets available via the twitter search interface, then you should be able to see output. If not, or if the tweets are more than a few weeks old, then you will see a message stating that there are no tweets available.

Installation

Login to your Mura CMS admin
Go to "Site Settings" (upper-right on the yellow bar)
Select the "Plugins" tab
Browse to the location of the TwitterTweets.zip file (don't unzip the files! Mura will do this for you. Unless, of course, you want to poke around the code.)
Click "Deploy"
You need to enter you twitter username. For example, if you visit http://twitter.com/stevewithington, then "stevewithington" is your username.
Under "Site Assignment" be sure you select which site(s) you wish to apply this plugin to
Go to the "Site Manager" of the site you wish to display this on
Select a page to edit
Select the "Content Objects" tab
From the "Available Content Objects" dropdown, select "Plugins"
Then select "TwitterTweets" and choose which area to display on by clicking the ">>" button
Click "Publish"

Optional settings at this point are merely how many recent tweets to display and whether or not you want to show a title above the tweets.

Need help?

Catch me on the Mura CMS forums or contact me through my site.

Cheers!

Edit

I was asked about using more than one twitter username and how to handle the plugin for multiple sites. The answer is actually quite simple. All you would have to do is install and deploy TwitterTweets again. This would allow you to have multiple installs, each with their own username, etc. This also gives you control over which install goes to which site(s).

I am considering including the ability to have multiple usernames for one install though.

Any other suggestions?