New WordPress Plugin Fixes Support For Podcast Enclosures
Oct 27th, 2008 | By James Lewin | Category: Podcasting Software 
Ludicrous has released a new WordPress plugin, the snappily named MagpieRSS Hotfix for Enclosure Support and Character Encoding Issues, that enhances the WordPress RSS parser, adding support for RSS enclosures.
This free plugin adds support for RSS enclosures to MagpieRSS, the RSS parser behind the fetch_rss() function in WordPress. It also forces MagpieRSS to use UTF-8 character encoding, which fixes some issues with feeds that contain non-ASCII characters.
The developer notes that the plugin is only going to be of use to you if:
- You are fetching feeds on your blog with the fetch_rss() function and want to parse enclosures contained in the feed; or
- You are fetching feeds on your blog either with the RSS Sidebar Widget or with fetch_rss() and question marks are showing up somewhere in the feed where special characters are supposed to be.
If you’re developing a custom podcast solution with WordPress, you may want to check this plugin out.
Combined with the Blubrry Powerpress plugin, this would allow the average WordPress user to essentially merge multiple podcast blogs together onto a single WordPress web site. This is awesome news!
Angelo
And then…..they could rule the world!
Hopefully WordPress will build this in before too long.
Hi James,
Thanks very much for the link to my plugin!
Just to let you and your readers know that I’ve released an important update to the plugin which fixes issues that almost everyone was having where WordPress was using cached feeds that didn’t contain the enclosure data.
This is fixed now, and the updated plugin can be found at the same place: http://lud.icro.us/wordpress-plugin-magpierss-hotfix/