After months of slow death and then a year of no apparent life except one short blog article by Matt Mullenweg, Podpress is once again under at least maintenance-mode development. Thanks to Tim Berger for coming to the rescue. The latest version as of now is 8.8.5 beta, which I am currently running successfully on yokosukachurch.com and the current stable version is 8.8.4 which is sending podcasts out on a few other church sites that I maintain here in Japan.

Years back podpress was the undisputed best plugin for podcasting in WordPress but then the original author suddenly stopped maintaining the code. He promised to return to the project “soon” but eventually even his most ardent supporters began to disappear from the forums. Finally even the support forum got shut down, ostensibly because of spam, but more likely because the grumbling against this developer was getting pretty loud. I can’t cast stones here because it has been years since I touched my active-x controls on shrinkwrapvb.com and I still get weekly, sometimes daily requests for support on those. Life can make one busy and priorities can change. But in order to keep using Podpress I have had to hack and patch on every install and every upgrade since about WordPress 2.5. This brought me no joy since it seemed I was fighting a losing battle – with the original author being long gone, never to return. I actually almost switched to another plugin or two for the same functionality, but the problem of migrating all the back episodes of my podcasts kept me making small bugfixes to podpress.

Until – now! Once again I am using the official svn repository versions of podpress and the only hacks I need to make are on sites where I want to add Japanese text or custom features/graphics. Podpress lives on to fight another day.

DOWNLOAD LINKS FOR PODPRESS

Official page at WordPress.org: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/podpress/

SVN repository: http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/podpress/