If you’re a podcaster, there’s three stages of producing a podcast: recording, editing, and distribution. There’s a number of ways to record, edit, and distribute podcasts, but when it comes to distribution, you can’t get much better than a WordPress blog and the PodPress plugin.

Believe it or not, a WordPress blog is all you need to generate a feed for a podcast, because when it comes to distribution, all that you really need is the feed. (Wow, I’m a poet and I didn’t even realize it.) However, what if you want a way for visitors who come to you website to listen to episodes? How do you deal with those iTunes RSS tags in the feed? And is there a way to make it easier to add the enclosure to the feed? Enter PodPress.

When you install the PodPress plugin, the first thing you want to do is go to the settings. PodPress actually generates live previews of how your podcast will look on various directories, including iTunes Store, Yahoo! Podcasts, Podcast Alley, and Podcast Ready. You can then use the Feed/iTunes Settings page to set the details about your podcast, including album artwork, copyright info, iTunes categories, explicit tag (on/off/clean), and more. Under the General Settings section, you can specify a location on the server where your episodes are uploaded to (more on that below). PodPress also has its own fairly comprehensive stats engine which you can turn on, and although it does report good stats, the presentation of these stats could be cleaned up a bit.

One of the more interesting features that PodPress comes with is something called Premium Content. If you turn this feature on, it creates a new role within WordPress called “Premium Subscriber”, and you can then specify certain episodes to be “Premium Only”. What this means is that in order for any of those “Premium Only” episodes to be downloaded, the user has to be logged in as a Premium Subscriber when they subscribe. This provides a way to manage the offering of “exclusive” content to special users (like users who pay you…). I actually haven’t used it (because no one would pay us anyway), but it sounds like an interesting feature.

When you actually go to write a new post, there’s a new section at the bottom of the page called Podcasting. When you click on Add Media File, you are then presented with options for adding a new media file. (You should have already uploaded the file at this point.) If you’ve uploaded it to the episodes location that you specified above, the file will show up in the drop-down menu, otherwise you can choose “Specify URL…” and enter a URL to the download. PodPress then allows you to specify a Title, Type, Size, and Length, along with specifying which feeds to include it in (FYI: You can only specify one enclosure per item in an RSS2 feed). PodPress also comes with a Flash player for MP3 files which you can turn on (it’s the overused one with the play button that slides out to the right), and you can also specify a default poster image for video players. When you publish it, the actual post will display, followed by the player and download links at the bottom of the post. It actually works very well, and is pretty slick.

In conclusion, PodPress is an essential plugin for anyone who wants to podcast using WordPress (now if only it was built-into WordPress.com!). It’s true that some of the stats are a little messy, and could use some reorganization (a la WordPress.com Stats, maybe?), but it still makes it really easy to turn your blog into a podcasting feed, and works very well with podcast feed readers (”podcatchers”) and podcast directories.

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Tags: feed, iTunes, plug-in, podcasting, PodPress, review, Software, WordPress