A while ago Chris Pendleton had blogged about Bing Maps for WordPress. In his post he described a plugin that was developed by Rich Gubby using the Bing Maps AJAX Control. Just yesterday I discovered now another Bing Maps plugin for WordPress. This one is using the Bing Maps Silverlight Control and was developed by Regart.net. You can download the plugin directly from the WordPress Plugin Directory.
Once you have installed and activated the plugin you can define a couple of default properties in the Settings:
One mandatory property is the Bing Maps Key and if you don’t have one yet you can create it at the Bing Maps Portal. After you have entered your key you can start right away using the plugin. When you create a new post you can either use special tags in the editor or use a wizard that can be launched through a new button in the editor.
When you launch the wizard you can enter properties like culture, centre-point of the map and locations of pushpins and the tags will automatically be generated for you. The short-code would look like this
[sl-bingmaps background=”transparent” width=”100%” height=”400″ NavigationVisibility=”1″ CopyrightVisibility=”1″ LogoVisibility=”1″ ScaleVisibility=”1″ ZoomLevel=”17″ Mode=”Aerial” StartLocation=”51.50809105417733_-0.07589511573314667″ Culture=”en-GB”]</p>
And here is the result:
As a side-note: If you are interested in running WordPress with SQL Server instead of the default MySQL or if you even want to go a step further and host your WordPress blog on Windows Azure and SQL Azure have a look at this 4 part tutorial. Amazingly simple and works like a charm.
Happy Blogging ^JK