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 https://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 https://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:

1. Download the plugin from the Mura CMS App Store's plugins section
2. Note the location of the 'muramediaplayer.zip' file that you downloaded
3. Log in to your Mura CMS Admin area
4. Click 'Site Settings' found on the top-right portion of the screen on the yellow bar
5. Select the 'Plugins' tab
6. 'Browse' to the location of the 'muramediaplayer.zip' file and select it
7. Click 'Deploy' and the 'Plugin Settings' form should appear
8. If you want to change the 'Plugin Name,' feel free to do so
9. 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
10. 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.
11. 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.
12. Under 'Site Assignments,' select the site(s) you wish to enable the plugin to run on.
13. Click 'Update' when finished.
14. 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 https://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.

The first step in removing the SiteID from the URL in Mura CMS is to edit the file located at /config/settings.ini.cfm. Find the 'siteidinurls' attribute and set it to read siteidinurls=0. If you don't see this attribute, you might be using an older version of Mura, and you should probably upgrade your install. If for some reason, you cannot upgrade your install, then read this Mura blog posting titled Removing the SiteID from URLs in Mura.

Once this is done, you're usually pretty good to go. However, you can still actually navigate to your pages with the SiteID in the URL. In fact, when you preview your site from the Admin area, it usually includes the SiteID and someone expressed a desire to "fix" this for search engine optimzation (SEO), analytics, etc.

This is actually pretty easy to do by adding a few lines of code to your Mura CMS templates. The easiest thing to do would be to probably just add this to your 'html_head.cfm' file if you use it.

Hope this helps!

How would you like to spend a full day with the folks who created Mura CMS from the ground up? Are you in or around the Minneapolis, Minnesota region ... and if not, can you get there by April 21, 2010?

Well, Team Mura recently announced they would be offering an in-depth, full-day "Programmers Guide to Mura CMS" on Wednesday, April 21st, 2010. This is technically a "cf.Objective() 2010 Pre-Conference" event, however, you don't have to attend the full conference to take advantage of this great opportunity.

Here are a few of the topics that will be covered:

• Programmatically working with content in Mura CMS
• Working with Mura CMS objects
• Understanding the Mura CMS event model
• Integrating Existing or 3rd Party Applications
• Building Mura CMS Plugins
• Extending and customizing Mura CMS while staying on the upgrade path

This full day course will be limited to the first 20 students and costs only $500. Considering the number of Team Mura developers that will be on hand, you probably won't be able to find a better student to instructor ratio. Oh, and for what it's worth, I'll be there too!

Before you say no to this awesome deal, I ask you to take something else into consideration. Have you ever attended a training event only to go back to your office, sit at your desk and not truly applied the newly learned knowledge? If you are a web site developer and have either looked at, used Mura CMS, or are even a seasoned Mura CMS developer and want to build sites more efficiently while allowing your clients the ability to manage their own content ... then you will most definitely be able to bring what you've learned back to your office and apply it to your job the very next day. Yes, I mean that if you attend on Wednesday, by Thursday you will be more productive, period.

Again, only the first 20 students will be accepted, so register now before it's too late!