[Plugin: Blubrry PowerPress Podcasting plugin] Limit podcast form to custom post type edit page

We recently answered a similar question to this on the blubrry.com forums: http://forum.blubrry.com/index.php/topic,3579.msg9858.html.

Depending on what you’re trying to accomplish either podcast channels tied to custom post types and/or a roles and capabilities plugin can be used to manage what powerpress capabilities users have.

In this original thread, mobius1ski wanted to limit users to specific custom post type and capability, to manage at that level you would need a roles and capabilities plugin. Roles and capabilities can become as complex as you want to imagine. It’s similar to LDAP as far as management goes, you can setup and endless number of possibilities of roles and capabilities for your users.

You need to enable this feature in PowerPress manually because the plugin by default emulates the default behavior of WordPress. It is possible to podcast with WordPress as any writer/editor without PowerPress, the way it is designed natively all you have to do is put a link to a media file in the blog post and it automatically becomes an enclosure (podcast episode). When you add PowerPress, it functions the same as WordPress does natively and assumes anyone who can write/edit can create an episode.

To enable this feature in PowerPRess, navigate to PowerPress > Tools menu, there is an option titled “Add PowerPress Podcasting Capabilities for User Role Management“, click this to enable the feature. This adds the capability “podcasting” and adds it to the administrators, editors and authors roles. Contributors and subscribers roles do not have access to podcasting capability.

Once you get into trying to separate one custom post type to one batch of users and another custom post type to another batch of users, or you want to change what roles get the podcasting capability, you need a roles and capabilities plugin to manage it.

I’ve added to my feature TODO list to add “type and capability management” to PowerPress. When added, it will add another menu to PowerPress settings where you can pick specific post types and/or type capabilities.

bheffron: This original thread was “how to manage podcasting by custom post type”. You can now do this with PowerPress.

Someone may add a custom post type with a custom type capability, in that case you need to add the following define to your wp-config.php to tell PowerPress to use that capability type in addition to “page” and “post”. Here’s the define with an example:

define('POWERPRESS_CUSTOM_CAPABILITY_TYPE', 'my_custom_capability_type‘);

What you (bheffron) and cwulff want is to be able to remove podcasting from the default post types of capability type “post” and “page”.

To explain again, WordPress added these default capability types. If you add your own custom post type with a capability type of “page” or “post”, by default you are provided the podcasting episode boxes by PowerPress, because blog posts and pages can podcast. All other capability types do not get podcasting boxes unless you configure PowerPress otherwise.

It works this way without PowerPress. Just paste a media URL into your own custom post type (with capability type “page” or “post”), click save, then go to your custom fields, you will see WordPress automatically makes that media URL into an “enclosure” (this is a podcast, just without any of the iTunees stuff PowerPress adds).

This is complicated and may take a while before I can add such functionality. Please keep in mind I work on PowerPress in my free time, on occasion I get time from work to develop new features, but for the most part I work on this on nights and weekends. So be patient, no need to be rude!