WordPress.org

Please, use the WP.org Plugins and Hacks forum to ask your questions or for bug reports. When you post in this forum please add at least the tag "podpress" to your post. That makes it very much easier to get a notice of your post (There is a RSS feed of forum posts which are tagged with "podpress".). (The domain name of the official podPress FAQ page is currently (03/2010) unavailable resp. parked. You can still find some traces of this Wiki at Archive.org.)

What does podPress with the Feeds?

• podPress adds automatically additional elements (e.g. iTunes RSS tags) to the default RSS Feeds of your weblog. But it can be used to modify also diverse elements of the ATOM Feeds of a blog. You can find most of the related options at the Feed/iTunes settings page of podPress. Furthermore it is possible to configure these options for each category Feed separately. This feeature is called Category Casting and you can activate and configure it for existing post categories at the page where you can edit the settings of a category.
• But podPress adds also completely new Feeds to your weblog. These Feeds might be RSS or ATOM Feeds and you can control the content of the Feed for instance with a category filter or a file fype filter. You can configure those Feeds also at the Feed/iTunes Settings page of podPress in the section podPress Feeds.

How can I create multiple Podcast Feeds?

There are basically two ways:

• One way is to use the Category Casting feature to adjust all kinds of podcast related elements in the category feeds of the blog. WordPress produces these category Feeds and you can customize them with podPress. These Feeds containing posts of one category. You activate the Category Casting feature while you edit an existing category in which you edit an existing category.
• The other possibility is to add one or more additional, new Feeds to the blog with the help of the settings of the podPress Feeds section at the Feed/iTunes Settings page of podPress. You can influence the content of these podPress Feeds with the help of a category filter and a file type filter. With the file type filter you can determine that a Feed contains for instance only posts with .mp3 or .m4a podcast episodes regardless of the categories of the posts. But it is also possible to create something like category Feed with the category filter. But with the differences that you can select more than category per Feed and that such podPress Feeds have maybe nicer URLs.

(Notice: After creating a podPress Feed, after changing a slug name or after (de-)activating such a Feed, you need to re-save the Permalink settings of your blog.)

How can I add podcast episodes with podPress?

First you need to upload the podcast files with WordPress or probably with a FTP client software. (Often podcast files are to big to upload them with a web formular like the WordPress Media Uploader. in such case you will need to use a FTP client software or comparable program.) It is basically a good idea to store the podcast files in sub folders of the /wp-content/uploads/ folder of your blog. After you have uploaded a media file, you create or edit the post (or page) which should contain an episode. Below the editor box you will find a separate box with the title "podPress - postcasting settings for this post". There you insert the complete URL of the podcast file and enter or determine automatically some meta information about the current episode like the duration or the file type and size. While saving or publishing the post these podcast information are getting saved as well.

(You can get probably a good impression how it works from this WP.org forum thread although the original question is a little bit different. This other WP.org forum thread might also be helpful.)

Does podPress has HTML5 support?

Yes. podPress (since 8.8.10) embeds .mp3, .ogg and .ogv media files with the HTML5 <audio> and <video> tags if the browser of the visitor supports these media file types in combination with these HTML5 tags. This means that podPress will embed MP3 files for all browsers with the WebKit layout engine of the version 525.x and newer (e.g. Safari, Chrome) and the Internet Explorer 9 (and newer) with the tag. Ogg Audio and Video files getting embedded with the HTML5 media tags for browsers with the Gecko engine of version 1.9.1 and newer (e.g. FireFox) and for browsers with the Presto engine of the version 2.5 and newer (e.g. Opera). For more information see the Comparison of the layout engines. Otherwise podPress embeds the media files as before with Flash-based players or as objects which require other browser plugins.

It is possible to disable the usage of these HTML5 tags (podPress / Player Settings).

The desktop versions of the browsers which support these HTML5 media tags have different behaviours regarding the buffering of the media files. For instance Safari and Chrome start to download/buffer all media files of one page which are embedded with these HTML5 tags after the page is loaded. Because this would probably increase the web traffic podPress shows by default a Play button and only a click on such a button will make the player visible and start it. But if the amount of web traffic does not matter then it is possible to let podPress show the HTML5 players directly.

How can I submit podcast episodes to iTunes?

podPress creates a RSS feed with additional information for iTunes. You can use the "Feed/iTunes settings"-page of podPress to determine what the content of these iTunes RSS tags should be. It is possible to subscribe to this feed directly with the iTunes client program. But you can add your podcast Feed to the iTunes Store. For more information go to the iTunes Podcast Resources / Making a Podcast / Submitting Your Podcast to the iTunes Store.

What is this iTunes:FeedID?

If you submit your podcast to the iTunes Store then your podcast will get an ID. Insert this ID on the "Feed/iTunes settings"-page of podPress e.g. if you want to use the Feed Buttons widget of podPress. podPress creates the link to your podcast in the iTunes Store with this ID.

How can I change the my podcast feed URL in the iTunes Store?

Apple describes how it works basically in their iTunes Podcasting Resources and how you can do this with podPress is dicussed in this WP.org forum thread.

How can I set a post specific license and license URL?

Define two custom field per post. One with the name podcast_episode_license_name and the name of the license as the value and one custom field with then name podcast_episode_license_url and the URL to the full license text. It is necessary to define at least the URL. If the name is not defined then the name will be the URL.

I have a post and have added two (or more) media files via podPress. Why is it not possible to mark them all for the usage in a RSS Feed?

podPress allows only one media files enclosure per post in the RSS Feeds because the RSS specification is unclear about this point and W3.org Feed Validator would say that it is not recommended to have more than one <enclosure> per RSS post element (<item>). You can find a summary about this matter in part 1 and part 2 of in article at the therssweblog.com. But probably more important is that iTunes recognizes only the first <enclosure> of each <item>. That is also valid for multiple enclosure elements per <entry> element of an ATOM Feed. But if like to have more than one media file per post in an News Feed then you could use such a Feed. You can use the "Include in:" option in the box below the post editor to choose the media file which should be in the default RSS Feeds.

Why are no iTunes-tags in the ATOM Feeds?

Because the iTunes-tags are only defined for RSS Feeds. (But iTunes is able to handle ATOM Feeds with podcast episodes or other media files.)

Blank screen after activating podPress

Some PHP5 users end up with a blank screen after activating the podPress plugin. For reasons yet fully understood some PHP5 installations consume double the memory compared to a PHP4 install when dealing with WordPress. Some notes I have seen blame it on a bug with caching objects in session data, but I have not debugged it to that level yet. The solution is to increase the memory_limit in your php.ini from 8MB to at last 12MB

How do I upgrade PodPress?

In general this just requires that you replace the existing files with the new ones. Sometimes it is a good idea to delete all the files in wp-content/plugins/podpress/ and re-upload them fresh.