Learning the World

We’re gearing up for a WordPress Mu pilot at the college, and I’m feverishly researching plugins to use with it. Here are the big three I found:

• PodPress: The godfather of podcast plugins. It hasn’t been updated in a while, and there have been mixed reports about how well version 8.8 works with WordPress 2.7. A new version 9 is apparently in the works, but no one knows if/when it will appear. The file upload interface is a bit clunky, but there are a huge number of backend-options, plus stat tracking.
• Podcasting: A simple plugin that requires you know the URL of the file you want to podcast. That’s fine for tech-savvy people, but I think it’s going to fail the “quick and easy” test for everyone else.
• Blubrry: The lead contender. It works with the regular file upload interface for WordPress; if you insert a file into a post using the regular interface, it adds an MP3 player to the post. It also has a nice selection of backend feed options.

I still need to experiment with how these different plugins handle video files (so far, Blubrry worked like a charm), and I’m continuing to look at other options. I’d love to get some feedback on how well these different plugins work, as well as recommends for plugins not on the list

podPress is a podcasting module for WordPress created by Mighty Seek. It allows you to customize your feed, attach (but not upload) files to the feed, and track statistics about who’s doing what with the podcast (e.g. playing it on the site, downloading it, etc.)

It comes with an audio player (I haven’t mucked about with the video options yet) that allows audio to be played on the page.  It supports built-in previews showing you how the podcast’s entry will look in the most popular podcasting directories (including iTunes and Yahoo).

The good news is that it appears to work out of the box with WordPress Mu, which is fantastic. One of our major goals for the WordPress pilot is to be able to support podcasting, and I think this would be a great tool for doing it. It also helps that almost every podcaster I know who uses WordPress also uses podPress … and I know a lot of podcasters.

The only downside to the app that I can see is that you can’t upload files as part of it; you need to upload the file using the “add media” buttons in WordPress, copy the path to said file, and then paste that path into the podPress portion of the page.

It’s clunkier than I expected; if nothing else I’d like for it to be able to browse the user’s media directory. I can see this cutting and pasting of urls being a little clunky for new users, but given the rest of podPress’s feature set, I think we can live with it.

I’m looking at doing a pilot of WordPress Mu as a campus-wide blogging platform, and I’m curious as to what others experiences have been with the software. At this point I’m kicking the tires and figuring out what plug-ins we’d need to include to do what we want to do.

I see four big needs for the blogging platform:

• Blogging (it does this out of the box, no big deal)
• Podcasting (in theory, I think it creates RSS enclosures for uploaded files, but I’d rather that give people a finer degree of control)
• Video Insertion (plugins for YouTube, Hulu, etc.)
• Photo Galleries

PodPress seems a logical choice for Podcasting, but I’ve heard mixed reports about how well it works with Mu. Photo Galleries are another challenge; we’re debating going with a hosted service like Flickr vs. a locally installed option like Gallery. Authentication is the big issue there; if we go with Flickr, everyone has to maintain their own accounts. If we go with Gallery or something hosted locally, then we have a better chance of integrating it into our existing authentication schemes.

Using Mu? Curious about our own experiments? Post a comment below.