Simple Podcast

Simple Podcast

Simple Podcast is just that - a simple module for quickly setting up one or more podcasts within your Drupal site, and immediately having an iTunes compatible xml podcast feed, no coding or extensive configuration required.

Alternatives to this Module

While we think this module is the simplest solution, there are other ways to achieve the same end goal:

• Feeds module + RSS format (this requires some custom coding to get the right xml format for iTunes)
• Views + Views Podcast module (unmaintained, media must be hosted off-site)
• Views + Views RSS + Views RSS: iTunes Elements (a little more complicated to set up)

If you aren't looking to use Views, or having other RSS feeds isn't critical, or you just want the feed to render blazing fast and put as little strain on your platform as possible, then this module is probably the best choice for you.

If you're already using Views + Views RSS for other needs, you may still want to compare the performance and complexity of the Views RSS: iTunes Elements based solution to this module to determine which module best fits your site's needs.

This module renders fast by bypassing the Drupal theme layer and implementing its own very simple theming system for rendering the xml feed. This system allows overriding the template similar to Drupal's theming engine, but does not offer the full robust complexity and functionality of Drupal's theming engine. If you need for the XML output to be fully handled by the Drupal theme layer, you may want to consider using one of the alternate solutions mentioned above.

How it works

Simple Podcast provides:

• two new content types:
  1. Podcast Feed
  2. Podcast Item
• a new taxonomy vocabulary:
  • Podcast Category
• a set of permissions for edit/create/delete of each content type
• an alternate formatter that can be triggered with a query parameter of "xml" or "itunes" that bypasses Drupal's theming engine, allowing for extremely fast rendering.

Simple Podcast also provides an optional submodule that will add all iTunes compatible categories to the vocabulary, but you can use the main module and provide your own category names without enabling the submodule if you plan to use this with a different podcast service.

Requirements

• ctools
• entityreference
• features
• field_collection
• file
• file_entity
• getid3
• hierarchical_select
• hs_taxonomy
• image
• link
• list
• media
• options
• pathauto
• publication_date
• strongarm
• taxonomy
• text

On the Roadmap

1. Clean up:
   • Remove the HTML5 template that is bypassing Drupal's theme layer. For rendering pages, it is best that the Drupal theme layer handle this.
   • Add more comments to code, general code style cleanup
2. API documentation updates
3. Add support for referencing files stored external to Drupal, such as those on a CDN
4. Port to D8