Plodcasting

Plodcasting is a Podcasting product for Plone. This tool will allow a radio station or community audio project to publish audio files for users of iPodder to automatically download. The initial version of Plodcasting has been released on Plone Collective's SVN server.

Current release

No stable release available yet.

Project Description

Podcasting is an audio-blogging tool, but with a focus on audio. Blogging technologies such as RSS are used to automatically deliver audio content. As new content is published, the RSS Feeds are automatically updated and allow people to download just the content they are interesated in. Podcasting programs like iPodder are capable of subscribing to these RSS feeds and can also automatically add the downloads to a personal music collection.

About this Product

Plodcasting has been written by Salim Fadhley, for London's Resonance FM . The structure of the project is designed for a radio station wishing to showcase a collection of shows and producers.

In addition to a basic blog-like structure, this product includes:

  • A modified portal_url tool that generates Coral-Cache compatible URLs. This feature allows a small radio station to offload much of the bandwidth requirments onto a global network of free cache servers, and as a result achieve a potential saving in hosting costs.
  • The Ping Tool (Portal Pinger), can automatically RPC ping blog-aggregators to let them know you have published some new content.
  • An enhanced version of ATAudio, that extracts ID3 metadata and MPEG stream information from the uploaded files.
  • An AT References based topic system. Each show object can be associated with Producers. Each Episode can have a number of topics associated with it. Each of these related objects can be used to build its own podcast stream, allowing the audience to pick the shows, producers and topics they are most interested in.
  • Filesystem based storage of MP3 files, keeps the ZODB lightweight.

Getting the Product

I've not yet released any official versions, however as this product is still very new, it's probably best to take it directly from Subversion. Most of it's dependancies are included in Plone Collective, so you may need to obtain more than one item from subversion:

Latest version of Plodcasting: http://svn.plone.org/collective/Plodcasting/trunk/

Plone Collective Subversion (You can find most dependancies here): http://svn.plone.org/collective/

Project Status

This is an initial release. The software almost certainly contains more bugs than any person can count, but has proved its worth in a number of presentations. Patches, bugfixes and criticism of this project are all welcome.