Best way to add music to CMS-created sites without Iframes or ajax?

Question

I'm doing some work on a site that let's users create their own mini-sites. My client wants users to be able to upload music and have it continuously play as visitors navigate the site. The only good way I can think of doing this is an Iframe, but obviously that will than get rid of unique URLs. I also don't want to use Ajax or a cookie to track the song's progress.
I was thinking maybe there was a way to have a popup player that closed simultaneously when the user exited the site?

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Pop-ups are difficult because of pop-up blockers and the reduced usability (additional window in user's task bar etc.) IFrames suck for the reasons you mention.

I think preventing page reloads by loading page contents through unobtrusive Ajax (With the menu items containing traditional links if JS is turned off) is the nicest solution:

You have a menu consisting of <a> links to normal pages:

www.domain.com/pagename.php 

but there's a click event on every link that, when fired, loads pagename.php into a content container through AJAX. It also sets the browser address bar to

www.domain.com/index.php#pagename

which, when opened, will translate to the index page opening, and loading pagename through AJAX (Will work for JS-enabled browsers only of course.)

This would require a fundamental re-work of your sites' structure though.

Answer 2

There's a module of script.aculo.us called sound.js, docs, is prototype/script.aculo.us based but you can easily port it to jQuery