Making an iTunes podcast feed with WordPress

Wed Mar 8 21:44:59 2006 EST (-0500 GMT)

WordPress is what powers this blog and is also what we used at work for The University Teaching Podcast WordPress can podcast right out of the box: codex.wordpress.org/Podcasting

What wordpress can’t do is include information podcast clients appreciate like an image for the podcast’s icon or the extensions iTunes added. In order accommodate this I choose to edit wordpress’ wp-rss2.php file in order to take advantage of the iTunes podcast standards and other podcast focused tags. The one thing these modifications don’t address are the and tags for each episode – all podcast clients we’ve come across can determine this information from the file once it arrives.

You will also notice the addition of the 60 tag — this Time To Live is not always honored by podcast clients, but if your podcast does experience popularity beyond your sever’s bandwidth, etc. this might make for a more graceful failure.

Here is The University Teaching Podcast ‘s current wp-rss2.php file. Please feel free top copy and paste this over your current file and make your revisions.

The source code is posted here: www.brocku.ca/~mclare/itunes_podcast_with_wordpress.php
It’s posted on my work webspace in order to take advantage of PHP’s ability to colour its own code.

UPDATE: A wordpress plugin called WP-iPodCAtter also addresses this issue, I have not tested this plugin.

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