Install an audio plugin without creating an account, and test it before you decide

The natural order, when you discover a tool, has three beats: you install it, you see that it works, and then you create an account. Many plugins invert that order: they ask for a sign-up, sometimes a card, before they even let you look at what they are. On a free plugin, that inverted order scares off exactly the people it should convince. The WeDispatch audio plugin for WordPress takes the opposite path, and this article describes that path in full, from download to the first voiced article.

The download asks for nothing

The plugin file downloads freely, with no account, from our WordPress page. It is a direct link to an archive, the same one served in the dashboard: there is no crippled trial on one side and a real version on the other, it is the same plugin. You have given no email, no password, no card. You have a file.

The requirements are those of any recent plugin: WordPress 6.0 or above, PHP 7.4 or above, the Gutenberg editor as well as the classic one. Nothing exotic.

Installing does not contact us

This is the point that matters to a cautious administrator, and it can be checked. You install the plugin like any other: Plugins, Add New, then upload the archive, Install, Activate. A WeDispatch menu appears in the admin sidebar. And that is all that happens.

Precisely: no table is created in your database, no file is written outside the plugin folder, and above all, no request leaves for us until you have connected an account. In other words, you can install the plugin, open its screen, read its settings and judge the interface without a single piece of data leaving your server, and without existing on our side. That is what testing before deciding means: you have the plugin in hand, on your own site, before committing to anything.

Where the account comes in, and what it asks for

Let us be clear, because honesty is the very subject of this article: to generate audio, you have to connect an account. We do not make sound on our servers for an anonymous site. But two things make this step different from the usual forced sign-up.

The first is timing. The account is not asked for to download or to install, but to connect, once you have already seen the plugin work empty. The second is what it costs: the free account asks for no card. You click Connect in WordPress, our site opens in a new tab, you create the free account or sign in if you already have one, you see your site's name and what the plugin will be allowed to do, and you authorise it. By that point you will already know whether the reading suits you, having paid nothing.

Connecting without a key, and why it lowers the caution required

The usual plugin method asks you to go and generate an API key on one site, copy it, and paste it into WordPress. That key crosses a clipboard, sometimes an email, often an internal chat thread, and ends up living in clear text in a database several people administer. It is a small permanent leak nobody watches.

Here there is no key to paste. The plugin exchanges a single-use code, valid for a few minutes, for its own key, server to server. You never see that key, nobody copies it, and it belongs to this site alone. One practical consequence matters more than it sounds: everything leaves from your end, so your site does not need to be reachable from outside. A staging site, an intranet, a password-protected site connects just as well as a public one. And you can revoke a site's connection from the dashboard at any time, without touching the others.

From the first audio to forgetting the plugin

Once connected, you choose which content types are covered, you can exclude sensitive categories, and you publish or update an article. The audio is ready in seconds for a news brief, under a minute for a long read, and the player appears at the top of the article or wherever you placed the Gutenberg block. After that, the plugin works without you: your journalists publish as before, and the audio version is made on publication, the way image thumbnails are. The full walkthrough, step by step and with what can go wrong at each one, is on our WordPress page, and how the plugin itself works in the WordPress text to speech plugin for French.

The summary fits in one sentence: you download and install with no account and without contacting us, you judge the interface on its merits, and the only moment you leave an email address (never a card) is when you decide to hear your first article. That is the natural order, put back the right way round.

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