WordPhone – New WordPress Plugin Lets Visitors Call From Your Blog | VXML Solutions

Would you like to add the ability on your WordPress blog for people to just click a button and call you using their web browser? Or call an application you have written?

Using the Phono JavaScript Library, developer Mark Silverberg has made this now incredibly easy to do with his new WordPress plugin available at:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordphone/

This plugin allows you to have a button on your site that will call any phone number, any SIP address – or any application created on the Tropo cloud communication service or Voxeo’s Evolution Developer Portal (VoiceXML, CCXML, CallXML, more).

Once you install and activate the WordPhone plugin through your regular method, you simply go to the “Appearance” panel in your WordPress admin screen and then go to “Widgets”.

To use this plugin, your WordPress theme needs to support widgets! (most do, but some don’t)

On the Widgets panel, you should now see a “WordPhone” widget displayed as one of your available widgets. Simply drag that widget over to one of your sidebars or other widget-ized areas:

After that, you’ll see a configuration screen where you can set several values:

The settings are:

• Title – appears above the button in most themes
• Phono API Key – you need to create a (free) Phono account and get an API key to paste in here.
• Connect To: – this is either the regular phone number or SIP address you want to connect to or the ID of an application on Tropo.com or Voxeo’s Evolution platform
• Numeric keypad option – if you are connecting to an application where you want people to make choices based on key presses, you can display this keypad
• Call Button Text – if you want something beyond simply “Call” you can enter the text here (for instance, you could have one button that says “Call Support” and a separate button that said “Call Sales”)
• Instructions To Users – blank by default but available if you want to clue users in to the fact that the call will happen through their browser – or any other info. This text shows up between the title and the actual button.

Save the settings and the button should now appear on your site. More info about the plugin can be found at its Github website of:

http://github.com/marks/WordPhone/wiki

The plugin is released under an open source license and Mark Silverberg is definitely open to any improvements or suggestions folks may have.

Mark also notes that the plugin is “skinnable” so you can customize it to match the design of your theme.

That’s it… check it out… install it into your WordPress blog and start calling!

P.S. John Higgins has a great writeup on using the plugin – and has it installed on his blog.

P.P.S. Know what else is cool? You can have multiple WordPhone widgets on your site… so you can have different buttons to call different numbers.

Notes:

• Calls to regular phone numbers and SIP addresses are limited to 10 minutes if they are made through simply entering the phone number in the widget.
• Calls have no length limit if they are to a Tropo or Evolution application.
• Phono uses Flash today and so users have to approve a security warning when they first start to use it. (other alternatives are being explored)
• It works best with a headset to avoid echo issues.

Originally from Voxeo Blogs

via vxmlsolutions.com