The changelog imperative

A shoutout to the developers of the Blubrry Powerpress podcasting plugin for WordPress.

The shoutout is for not only creating a very cool enhancement for WordPress blogs  – if you’re a podcaster with a WordPress blog, this plugin is a must-have – but also for making it easy to understand what’s changed from version to version.

That’s because they have taken the time and effort to include detailed and easy-to-understand information in a changelog.

powerpress-changelog-sm 

The changelog in Powerpress that you see here (click here or on the screenshot to see a full-size version) is one of the most useful I’ve seen in any WordPress plugin.

From a user’s point of view, it contains just enough information, presented in an easy-to-read style, that makes it clear for me to understand what’s changed with a new version when my blog admin alerts me that an upgrade is available.

I can see at a glance the information that helps me quickly decide whether I want to upgrade the plugin to the latest version (not every new version of a WordPress plugin means you have to or should upgrade).

Note also that the Powerpress developers have taken care of a small detail that I find irritating when it’s not done – made sure that information about which WordPress version the plugin is compatible with is up-to-date. In this case, it is.

I wish more plugin developers would do changelogs as useful as this that help their users understand what’s going on with their plugins.

In any event, thanks to the Powerpress developers!

Get detailed information about Powerpress on their website.

Powerpress: A viable alternative to Podpress

powerpress If you’re a podcaster and use the Podpress plugin on your WordPress blog to deliver your podcasts, you’ve probably been having a frustrating time of it during much of 2008.

The last release of Podpress was version 8.8, released in December 2007. That’s a year ago, a very long time in blog platform time scales as WordPress has released ten versions (including betas) since then. Significantly, Podpress says it works on WordPress up to version 2.3 which was released in September 2007.  There have been 13 versions of WordPress since then (we’re currently on WordPress 2.7); running Podpress on anything greater than WordPress 2.3 has been hit or miss for many people (who talk about Podpress a lot)  including me.

Amazingly, Podpress version 8.8 is still being downloaded hundreds of times a day.

Whether a new version of Podpress is in development or not – and according to Mark Blevis, PodPress is still a going concern – I finally pulled the plug in November on my use of Podpress as I wasn’t willing to continue relying on something in which my confidence decreased every time I cross-posted the latest FIR podcast, something I do here twice a week, every week. That confidence vanished entirely at the end of November.

Since then, I’ve been using Powerpress, a plugin for WordPress from Raw Voice, the company behind the Blubrry Podcast Network (of which FIR is a member), among other things.

Powerpress works fine on the latest version 2.7 of WordPress. It also worked fine on previous versions 2.6.3 and 2.6.5 that I tried Powerpress with.

Here’s a summary of Powerpress’ features:

  • Easily add/modify/remove podcast episodes from blog posts and pages
  • Integrated audio/video media player
  • iTunes RSS tags
  • iTunes album/cover art
  • Standard RSS Feed album/cover art
  • Podcast only RSS feed
  • Ability to upload new cover art
  • Ping iTunes
  • Media size detection
  • Duration length detection (mp3 only)
  • 3rd party statistics integration

Powerpress is easy to install and will inherit your Podpress settings so as to enable your existing posts with podcasts to work with Powerpress.

Blubrry has detailed help on installing and configuring Powerpress.

I have no hesitation in saying to you that if you use Podpress on a WordPress blog – version 2.5 or later (and it really should be ‘later’) – I’d switch to Powerpress for more peace of mind.

The only legacy I now have from Podpress is the need to edit nearly 400 posts to remove Podpress-specific codes.

Anyone know of a reliable MySQL batch process string I can run? The thought of manually editing all those posts is not attractive.

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