Bob Moz and his team at Topspin, the folks at Uprising Creative, and a handful of users have been putting the third-generation version of the Topspin WordPress plugin through the paces over the past week. The plugin, which was developed by the folks at Uprising, is open-source and available on github. If you are a capable WordPress/PHP programmer, and familiar with github, Topspin is encouraging folks to jump in and assist. For any commits that make it back into the plugin master file set they will pay out $150. That’s a great incentive to give back to the community and get some extra cash in the process.

In my tests the plugin had some issues earlier this week, but with this latest update the problems seem to have been resolved. The plugin makes uses of the Topspin offers API to dynamically pull data from your Topspin account and display it automatically on a store page. You can set-up as many “store” pages as you want or need and they have a lot of different formatting options. If you are capable at CSS you can style the pages up as you desire.
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Late last week, just after Topspin launched a new version of their direct-to-fan software at SXSW, they also released a new version of their WordPress plugin. This update was a long overdue and highly anticipated update to the popular plugin. In the readme.txt file Topspin describes the plugin as allowing one to “[q]uickly and easily integrate your Topspin Offers into customized, sortable and dynamically generated Store Pages”. They showed some of the new features of the plugin during their demos last week and they were quite impressive.

Please note that this is not an update to the existing plugin, but rather one that has been completely rewritten. So if you have been using v2, you will need install it separately rather than update your existing Topspin/WordPress plugin.

You can download the plugin via GitHub.

I’ve just downloaded the plugin today and look forward to testing it out. As soon as I can, I’ll give you guys some tips, tricks and feedback as I learn more.

Looks like the plugin was created by Uprising Creative and here’s a live store built using the plugin for AWOLNATION.

Here are the features listed on the plugin’s info page:

• Automatic Store Page creation based on Offer Types and Tags
• Display of Offers in some or all Offer Types and/or Tag groups
• Sorting by Offer Type(s), Tag(s), or Manually via the drag-and-drop admin interface
• Ability to select the # of columns for each Store Page from 1-6
• Ability to select the # of Offers to display on each page for Pagination
• Ability to set a Featured Item for each Store Page
• Customizable store name and slug
• Shortcodes for both Store and individual Featured Item content
• Immediate output of fully functional Store Pages will little or no CSS or Template customization (novice)
• Fully customizable Template and CSS files (pro)

This site will feature tips, tricks, tutorials and general information on how to use and make the most of Topspin as a user. My name is Chandler Coyle and I have been using Topspin for the past nine months and am a Topspin-certified Marketer. I have helped a handful of artists connect with their fans, build their fan mailing lists, stream audio and video, sell their back catalog and even launch a new album with deluxe bundles. Topspin is a great service and very powerful, so powerful that there are so many features that are obvious at first. My hope is that through this site I can help share information I’ve learned, the hard way, about using Topspin.

If you have any tips, tricks, or tutorials of your own that you would like to have added to the site, just contact me via the Contact page.

I run an artist services firm called Music Geek Services with my brother Jay Coyle. We are dedicated to helping bands and solo artists make the most of web sites, social networks, and the Topspin platform. We are a Topspin-certified marketer and are available for hire, just use the Contact page form to get in touch with us and find out how we can help you better understand Topspin.