/band-o-matic

Software for making beautiful mobile (iPhone/iPad) websites for bands.

Primary LanguagePHP

Band-o-matic

Band-o-matic is an open source web application for bands to create beautiful iPhone/iPad/mobile websites. Think of it like Wordpress for mobile band sites. Features include:

  • Beautiful full-screen photos and album covers for backgrounds, or choose from 10 built-in themes
  • Auto-resizing for multiple device sizes/orientations
  • Automatically pulls your latest news from RSS or Twitter
  • Automatically pulls your show listings from RSS (Gigpress or Artistdata currently work)
  • Popups show fresh messages, including links and photos, to visitors while they listen
  • Music is organized into albums for listening
  • Customizable contact/email page to connect with fan newsletter, and link to Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Band-o-matic also ties into Band-o-rama, a free iPhone/iPad app for listeners to discover and share new music and connect with new bands.

An example of a real Band-o-matic mobile site is:

Visit that link on your iPhone or iPad to see how a Band-o-matic site looks and feels (also works in most browsers too).

Getting Help

The official discussion group page for Band-o-matic is:

Prerequisites

You'll need a few things to setup a mobile site for your band:

  • Your own website, not just a Myspace or Facebook page. Your website must support PHP5.
  • An FTP program to upload files to your website.
  • MP3 files of some of your songs.
  • A photo editing program to make images of varying sizes for your site.

Getting Started

  1. Download a copy of the Band-o-matic software from this page:

  1. Unzip the download then use an FTP program to upload it to a folder named 'm' on your website. This will be where people find the mobile version of your site from now on (e.g., www.bandname.com/m).

  2. Still in your FTP program, edit the file permissions on the folders m/admin/config and m/admin/files and set the permissions to 0777 or read/write/execute for all. Make sure to click the option that says something to the effect of "Also change permissions on files inside this folder." For example in Transmit on the Mac, right-click the folders and choose "Get Info", then under "Permissions" check off all the boxes, then click "Apply to enclosed items." Using FlashFXP on Windows, you would right-click the folders and choose "Attributes (CHMOD)", check off all the boxes, then click "Apply changes recursively to sub-folders and files".

  3. Now open the m/admin/config folder and edit the settings.php file found inside. Change the values for admin_username, admin_password, and default_city and save the file. You can now close the FTP program.

  4. Open your web browser and go to www.bandname.com/m/admin on your website. Log in with the admin username/password from step 5. Bookmark this or save the link somewhere because this is where you'll go to keep your mobile site up-to-date. Follow the steps on each tab to setup your new site.

  5. Test it out on your iPhone/iPad and make sure it looks good. It should also work in any web browser, but the experience is tailored a bit to mobile devices.

  6. To redirect iPhone/iPad users from your main website so they automatically see your new mobile site, add this line to the <head> section of your main site's index.html file: <script src="/m/js/redirect.js"></script>

  7. Now go to http://www.band-o-rama.com/artists and register your band for the Band-o-rama service so that listeners can find you on there!

Credits

Band-o-matic was created by Johnny Broadway and released under the GPL Version 2 license.

Band-o-matic also makes use of a few 3rd-party open source libraries: