Plugin Needed For WordPress 1.5
WordPress 1.5 has been a good platform for my podcast and blog. However, there is desperate need for a plugin specifically tailored to podcasters or anyone who wants to include enclosures in their RSS feed. Why? WP 1.5 automatically makes an enclosure for any linked audio or video file in a post. Sounds nifty right? It is, most of the time. Unfortunately many of us will put more than one link to our podcast in a post. An example would be one link to the mp3 as a text link and one as a graphic – like I often do to make it easy for new visitors. This results in 2 enclosures in the feed. As a result I have to pull up any podcast post as soon as I publish it and edit it to delete the second enclosure.
Another issue is if you link to someone’s audio or video. Say you want to encourage those who are interested to click and listen to something. WP 1.5 automatically makes it an enclosure in your feed. Everyone who subscribes now gets the file. When you have thousands subscribed to your feed that is not fair to the other person. Or even when you post something on your own site – you don’t want to send it down the feed, but just want to make it available on the site as a link. You have to fight WP 1.5 when this happens. Every time you must publish, then immediately edit to delete the enclosure. I preferred entering them manually to this.
Now that WP 1.5 has enclosure support built in, I have to imagine this is rather straight forward. Surely (hopefully) there is an industrious plugin programmer that wants fame among podcasters for developing a plugin that will do the following:
1. An enclosure section on the Write page.
2. A choice that lets you choose whether or not to automatically generate enclosures for the post. I.e. you can select not generate an enclosure for that post.
3. A default preference for what #2 should usually be.
4. A way to allow you to manually enter an enclosure – much ike the old 1.2 plugin. URL, size and type.
If you are interested I would be happy to discuss and help test. Please? 
I’m interested as well, my suggestion is to see to it that the first link is always the Eclosed MP3… I start my post with the Direct download link
I know Mark from Brainwagon has done some hacking on this issue, though I don’t know of any plugin to deal with it yet. Did you try the 7 Days of Plugins?
Thanks Pete. I have looked both at Mark’s site and on WordPress, but have yet to find a suitable solution. It is a fairly obvious issue, soon enough someone with the appropriate skills will tackle it. (I hope.)
On a personal note, it is great to see Rasterweb! Audio is fired up again.
I added a link to this post in this WordPress bug report: http://mosquito.wordpress.org/view.php?id=1197
Matt has updated this bug, see here for the results: http://mosquito.wordpress.org/view.php?id=1197