Serendipity Forums

• the iTunes-podcast feed should be a seperate feed because usually you wouldn't want the standard RSS feed layout, namespaces and the standard blogname and subtitle (as description) in the feed. (I don't know how easy it is to accomplish to define a completely new feed. Any comments?)
• that means these things have to be in the plugin configuration. At least the title, description and some global entities required by iTunes like "language" and of course the special iTunes entities (i.e. "itunes:category"))
• as for the feed items: there needs to be a hook to the backend because on entry creation we need to know several things that can not be derived from the regular data (i.e. duration of the podcast). I'm not that far into the plugin API, yet, but I think that also means a new sql table. Does the API handle that? Another possibility would be to enclose such information in special tags inside the regular entry. not very clean, though.
• to immediately update the iTunes directory it could be pinged though XML POST as described in the above specs, if there are other podcast directories featuring this, they could be pinged as well.
• additionally the feed might be automatically patched though feedburner to keep track of the stats.

[*] the iTunes-podcast feed should be a seperate feed because usually you wouldn't want the standard RSS feed layout, namespaces and the standard blogname and subtitle (as description) in the feed. (I don't know how easy it is to accomplish to define a completely new feed. Any comments?)

case 'frontend_rss':
    if ($eventData['version'] != 'itunes') {
        // We only listen on the 'itunes' version and don't change other feeds
        break;
    }
    
    if ($eventData['template_file'] != 'feed_itunes.tpl') {
        // If the current setting for "template_file" is not a string like "feed_itunes.tpl"
        // this means that the user already has a LOCAL template file called this. In this
        // case, $eventData['template_file'] will be something like "/home/blog/templates/mytemplate/feed_itunes.tpl",
        // and our plugin should not override the local user template file
        break;
    }

    // Plugin directory must be a valid smarty template directory to display a feed .tpl from here!
    $serendipity['smarty']->template_dir[] = dirname(__FILE__);
    
    // Set the RSS-feeds template file to a template in the current plugin directory
    $eventData['template_file'] = dirname(__FILE__) . '/feed_itunes.tpl';
    break;

[*] that means these things have to be in the plugin configuration. At least the title, description and some global entities required by iTunes like "language" and of course the special iTunes entities (i.e. "itunes:category"))

[*] as for the feed items: there needs to be a hook to the backend because on entry creation we need to know several things that can not be derived from the regular data (i.e. duration of the podcast). I'm not that far into the plugin API, yet, but I think that also means a new sql table. Does the API handle that? Another possibility would be to enclose such information in special tags inside the regular entry. not very clean, though.

[*] to immediately update the iTunes directory it could be pinged though XML POST as described in the above specs, if there are other podcast directories featuring this, they could be pinged as well.

[*] additionally the feed might be automatically patched though feedburner to keep track of the stats.

It'd also be nice if the plugin development pros here could tell me how difficult and labor-intensive this endeavor is going to be. I got medium PHP skills. That means that as far as I have looked at the plugin API I understood what was going on.. but of course some pointers in the right directions would speed up the process of getting this done.

dakira wrote:Okay.. now I know that I need this stuff.. but are there any other podcasters who would appreciate such a plugin? Any additional thoughts?