Podcasting with WordPress

As we explain in the introduction to this chapter, to podcast, the Web site owner provides regular episodes of an audio show that visitors can download to their computer and listen to on their favorite audio player. Think of podcasting as a weekly radio show that you tune into, except that it's hosted on the Internet, rather than on a radio station.

In the sidebar “WordPress video and audio plugins” in this chapter, we mention a few plugins that allow you to more easily insert audio files in your WordPress posts and pages — however, a few plugins are dedicated to podcasting, and they provide features to podcasters that go beyond just embedding audio files in a Web site. Some of the more important of these features include

• Archives: Create an archive of your audio podcast files so that your listeners can catch up on your show by listening to past episodes.
• RSS Feed: An RSS feed of your podcast show gives visitors the opportunity to subscribe to your syndicated content so that they can be notified when you publish future episodes.
• Promotion: A podcast isn't successful without listeners, right? Podcasters like to promote their shows by including their audio files in the iTunes (www.apple.com/itunes) library so that when people search iTunes for podcasts by subject, they find the podcasters' podcasts and subscribe to them.

These three plugins go beyond just audio-file management, they're dedicated to podcasting and all the features a podcaster is looking for:

• PowerPress (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/powerpress): PowerPress has many of the features podcasters are looking for, including full iTunes support; audio players; multiple file-format support (.mp3, .m4a, .ogg, .wma, .ra, .mp4a, .m4v, .mp4v, .mpg, .asf, .avi, .wmv, .flv, .swf, .mov, .divx, .3gp, .midi, .wav, .aa, .pdf, .torrent, .m4b, .m4r); statistics to track the popularity of your different podcast offerings; and tagging, categorizing, and archiving of podcast files.
• Podcast Channels (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/podcast-channels): WordPress provides some of the basic stuff needed for podcasting, such as media-file embedding, archiving, and RSS feed handling. The Podcast Channels plugin gives you iTunes metadata that enables you to specify channels for your podcast files and include them in the iTunes library.
• Podcasting Plugin (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/podcasting): Enhances the built-in WordPress audio-management features by adding iTunes support, compatible RSS feeds, and media players. This plugin also allows you to have multiple podcasting feeds, in case you have different podcast shows that cover a range of different topics.