So yesterday was a day just like any other day, except that I had the pleasure of listening to a Movable Type user rant about our claimed, but "lacking" support for podcasting. Man, it hurts hearing such a passionate user become so frustrated.
But it is precisely at times like those that we at Six Apart swallow our pride and listen to our users. Not hear them. But actually listen to them.
And you know what, Todd is right about at least one thing: Movable Type's support for podcasting could be better. A lot better. So I went ahead and slapped together the first Podcasting Plugin for Movable Type 4.0, and I call upon Todd (and the rest of the Movable Type user community) to help me make this the best podcasting plugin for any blogging product.
Now I put together this first pass really quickly - in just a couple of hours actually, which I think is a testament to how easy it is to build a plugin on Movable Type for anyone who knows a little Perl, not to mention evidence to what it means to be a true Media Platform (see also the YouTube, Flickr and Amazon asset integration provided by Media Manager).
But I digress. I purposefully put together the most minimal feature set possible and still meet Todd's basic requirement: the ability to link to an externally hosted MP3 file and have Movable Type encode the necessary enclosures within an RSS and/or Atom feed. For fun I am redistributing a free flash MP3 player licensed under the creative commons to make it easy for users to allow readers to listen to their MP3 files directly from their blog.
But now I need to pass the baton to Todd, ProNet (especially Budd) and any other serious podcaster (Niall?) to help me shape the remaining feature set for this plugin. As a Product Manager myself I am reasonably certain think I could define a feature set myself, despite how clueless Todd may think I am, but I really do want this plugin to be something informed directly by the community. So please, everyone, chime in.
Todd, I am personally sorry you had a hard time with Movable Type. I sincerely hope this plugin will begin to provide the functionality you need, and I hope we can continue to evolve its feature set together as a team.
Byrne
We are going to start testing this tomorrow, thanks for putting it together and I hope the rest of the plugin developers add all the extra goodies to it that will make it a better plugin.
Todd..
Welcome back Todd! Thank you so much for your help. Remember, I wanted to create a shell of a plugin for the first pass. A clean-slate if you will, that we can begin to refine.