Featured images are native to WordPress core, allowing themes to represent posts and pages with images. But for many users, there are more important content formats than visuals. As a musician, I’ve explored different approaches to integrating WordPress’ audio functionality with post objects, most recently with the Sheet Music Library plugin.

I recently began exploring a new idea — a premium WordPress theme built specifically for musicians and musical groups — and I realized that WordPress needs a generic solution for the broad concept of associating audio files with posts. Post meta associated with specific custom post types or embedding audio directly in posts limits the opportunities for themes to display audio in unique ways and for plugins to create aggregated presentations of audio associated with different posts.

The Plugin

Seeking to introduce a broad solution to the challenges of deeply integrating audio with core WordPress functionality, I’m introducing the Featured Audio plugin. Featured audio is perfect for musicians, podcasters, and anyone who publishes audio content on their site frequently. It works with every theme out of the box by displaying WordPress’ native (mediaelement.js) audio player at the top of the_content. Themes that style the audio player already will offer a customized experience for site visitors using featured audio.

I’d love to see more themes designed specifically to make audio a central component of sites’ content. If they all leverage this standardized featured audio plugin, users publishing audio content can get a wide variety of options for displaying their content and the content adapts seamlessly from theme to theme, just like publishers of visual content get with featured images.

The Importance of an API

To make featured audio as broadly extensible as possible, I spent a significant amount of time building public API functions into the plugin that facilitate custom implementations and integrations. Where it makes sense, these functions parallel the post_thumbnail/featured images API in WordPress core. However, the most notable difference is that theme support isn’t required. Taking a similar approach to the Featured Image in Content plugin (but also always showing the admin UI), the content is available regardless of theme support to allow a broader array of themes to be used. Theme support is used to indicate custom implementations, and turns off automatic front-end display of featured audio on a technical level.

A majority of sites probably don’t use audio at all, making the idea of featured audio probably inappropriate for WordPress core. But by building a core-like solution that themes and other plugins can extend, we can provide audio publishers with similar opportunities to publish freely with WordPress. And the development of themes and plugins that extend and customize the experience will further promote publishing audio with WordPress.

Infinite Possibilities

Once the base API is in place via the Featured Audio plugin, there are endless possibilities for themes and plugins to expand the potential of featured audio to offer tools for publishers. Plugins can expand the API to offer additional functions for custom theme display, or other tools such as widgets or shortcodes to aggregate featured audio across posts. The core playlist functionality is especially promising here.

Themes can do anything from moving where featured audio is displayed or adding it to archive views that don’t display the content to showcasing audio in unique and unexpected ways in the front-end UI. We’ve seen featured image headers, so why not featured audio headers, with the ability to set up a default audio file in the customizer. I’m excited to see what theme designers can come up with.

To offer a glimpse of the possibilities, I’ve built a few advanced features into the plugin. The API includes arguments for the main the_featured_audio() function to display the title and/or album art (which WordPress automatically pulls from MP3 files that have it) alongside the audio player for easy display of additional information in themes. The plugin also adds a Featured Audio Playlist widget, which displays a playlist with all of the featured audio associated with posts on the current view, such as a blog index, archive, or taxonomy page. The playlist output is also available directly via an API function for custom display in themes outside of the widget context. For example, a playlist could be displayed alongside a taxonomy title and description at the top of a taxonomy archive. Playlists are great because they allow visitors to listen to more of your content without repeated manual interactions, and in this scenario they’re automatically created and organized on-the-fly based on the existing organizational structure of a WordPress site.

Content Ownership and Hosting

One of my personal goals with featured audio is to encourage publishers to host their own audio content directly in their WordPress site. Third-party services such as Soundcloud offer advantages in distribution but when it comes to displaying content on sites, I frequently get the impression that users don’t realize that they can host and publish their audio content directly. WordPress is about democratizing publishing, and part of that mission is to give users complete control over their content. With better resources for publishing audio directly in WordPress, fewer users will feel a need to turn to third-party services. Long term, it would be awesome to see third party social and aggregation sources for audio content pulling data out of WordPress sites rather than the other way around, as it is currently.

Next Steps

Now that the plugin is live on the repository, publishers can start using featured audio with the basic experience on any theme out of the box. But the really exciting opportunities come with plugins and themes that extend the basic experience, and it’s up to you to start designing and building those projects. I’m hoping to build a commercial musician-oriented theme that integrates with featured audio eventually, but the beauty of open source software is that anyone can create free or commercial products that build on this functionality. I’m excited to see what the community can do together to improve the experience of publishing audio content with WordPress.