I’ve been one of the many voices expressing concern about the longevity of the PodPress, the incredible podcasting plugin many of us WordPress users have adopted because of its powerful features and ease of use.
It’s been easy to worry about the plugin. Some time has past since the last update (code or even news of plans), and, more obviously, the disappearance of the support forums following a SPAM attack.
I spoke with PodPress creator Dan Kuykendall, yesterday. Dan has been busy with work and his new dual-role as both a techie and CEO and hasn’t been able to attend to PodPress on a day-to-day basis. He did say that he’s working on a new release and expects to put some time into the coding during the holidays later this month.
So, if you’re a PodPress user, hang in there!
Hmm.. maybe he would be better running the mightyseek site and podpress support on a wordpress blog rather than a wiki..?
Good to know it hasn’t been abandoned though. Looking forward to the updates.
Comment by nommo — December 14, 2008 @ 7:17 am
Unfortunately, I could not wait. One of my sites went wonky yesterday. Even with all the standard hacks in place, wordpress 2.7 wasn’t playing nice with podpress and podpress stopped serving rss enclosures. I had to switch it to Blubrry powerpress. I miss several features of podpress but I need a working site now. I will certainly consider switching if and when a new release comes out.
Comment by Sean McGaughey — December 15, 2008 @ 11:05 pm
Here’s hoping as I am waiting on the update before I upgrade anything!
Comment by Mark Boudreau — December 16, 2008 @ 12:46 pm
I had one heck of a time getting this plugin to work on a blog lately. Because of that I have decided to create a plugin of my own. I fully intend for it to take PodPress’ place in the world of WordPress. While PodPress is fantastic, it’s been months since there has been a release, and for far too many non-saavy users, is an impossibility to use on their sites.
Comment by Chris — December 18, 2008 @ 6:58 pm
Thanks for the posting. I’m looking forward to an update to Podpress.
Comment by steve — December 25, 2008 @ 6:19 pm
[...] a new version of Podpress is in development or not – and according to Mark Blevis, PodPress is still a going concern – I finally pulled the plug in November on my use of Podpress as I wasn’t willing to continue [...]
Pingback by Powerpress: A viable alternative to Podpress — NevilleHobson.com — December 28, 2008 @ 12:16 pm
We’re trying our best to develop Blubrry Powerpress to include most all of the features in Podpress. There are some underlying issues in Podpress that we addressed right away which meant some features haven’t been included in our plugin while others were improved upon. Here’s some details how we made our plugin to be more efficient and complete.
Pinging iTunes – Podpress version 6.4 (I believe) up to the current version no longer pinged iTunes (older versions used to ping iTunes). No idea why that code was removed from Podpress but it was. That’s a key feature that we made sure was included in Powerpress.
High PHP Memory Requirements – When analyzing Podpress, I found that the plugin requires a lot more memory allocated in PHP to run. After further analysis I discovered a lot of settings were pre-loaded in every WordPress page request, whether it was needed or not. Some of the features in Podpress are CPU/Memory intensive such as the media statistics, which is why we did not include built-in statistics in Powerpress. We went so far as to separate settings that are feed specific, that way they are not loaded every time a page is viewed.
Detecting Duration and Media Size – This was my own complaint, I never understood why it would take up to 5 minutes for Podpress to detect how many minutes were in my audio file. After doing some analyzing, I discovered that the AJAX script in Podpress to detect the media duration was prompting my server to download the entire media file to obtain the duration time. We developed our own code that is much more efficient, detecting the duration of a media file in less than a second no matter what the file size is.
There are still some other features in Podpress that we plan to add and then some. We want to make some of the new features a surprise, but I’ll indulge with some of them.
* Feedburner Support
* Convert Podpress Episodes
* Bulk Update Media URLs option (when changing media hosting)
* Additional Options (an advanced mode for publishing)
We’re reached out to Dan Kuykendall last week (no response yet but it is the Holidays), we’re hoping to get some of the issues resolved with the Blubrry Media Statistics option in Podpress 8.8. We’re hopeful and supportive that Dan will re-continue the Podpress plugin but just in case we’re going to continue to develop Blubrry Powerpress.
Part of our philosophy at Blubrry and RawVoice is that we want to provide tools and resources to Podcasters to keep them podcasting and save time. When WordPress 2.5 came out this summer, we got a rush of complaints from our Podcasters about their blogs no longer working. We promptly started development on Powerpress. We had a working version available with the core features within 2 weeks and we’ve been improving upon the plugin since.
If anyone has any feature suggestions, comments or concerns, please don’t hesitate to contact us. http://www.blubrry.com/contact.php
Thanks,
Angelo
Comment by Angelo Mandato — December 28, 2008 @ 8:18 pm
Even though Podpress is(was) a great plugin, I think that the problems we’ve been seeing are too big to ignore.. WordPress has gone even further past the revision that broke Podpress, and now not only do we not have a working Podpress, but there’s zero communication, and even the forums were removed! I would personally pay good money for a new, working Podpress, but the “ten days” has turned into six months, and I’m feeling more and more dissapointed as the days go on. Even though news like this is encouraging, the complete lack of communication makes me wonder if the guy is even alive, let alone actually working on the plugin.
Comment by Neil — January 23, 2009 @ 5:12 pm
Amazingly, PodPress 8.8 is working fine for me on all of my sites, from WP2.2 through WP2.7. It turns out that a category feed problem I was experiencing was due to an excessively large XML file – nothing to do with PodPress. Once I corrected that problem, all of my outstanding PodPress issues went away.
I admit that the delay in a new version is cause for concern, however, PodPress is still a fully working solution for me. It still IS a great plugin. The Internet culture has conditioned us all to expect regular updates to software even when updates aren’t specifically necessary. The biggest outstanding issue with PodPress in light of recent advancements in WP is its incompatibility with the revision feature in WordPress – a feature that typical blogs don’t need and that is easily disabled (I’ve done so on all of my sites).
To me, the real issue with PodPress is the absence of communication. And, I must admit, I’m starting to think about preparing a migration plan if things stay silent much longer.
Comment by Mark — January 23, 2009 @ 5:32 pm
Mark, if you’ve got the contact info for Dan, do you think you’d be able to drop him a line on the topic? I’m sure there are quite a few people still interested in Podpress, but we’re starting to slowly creep up to a year without any word.
Comment by Neil — March 11, 2009 @ 4:51 pm