Todd Cochrane who wrote the book on podcasting, Podcasting: Do It Yourself Guide1, wrote a harsh post about Movable Type 4 not living up to its announced podcasting support claims. The article begins:
From today forward I will no longer recommend Movable Type as a viable new media blogging / podcasting platform. I will recommend WordPress to any and all that ask my advice.
Todd elaborates in the comments on the experience in WordPress that has contributed to his conversion:
Wordpress does have native support when you are publishing a post you will see add media at the bottom of the page.
If you add your media there and hit publish the media will be included as a enclosure in your RSS feed.
While you will not have all the fancy itunes tags you can manually edit your rss template and add that data to be included.
To make it easy the podpress plugin makes it easy for you to add the itunes data to the feed.
Another thing to consider is that at least you can publish a podcast with WordPress today. You cannot say the same with MovableType Version 4 it is simply not possible to publish a podcast with the current version of the blogging software.
Welcome to the team Todd!
This is a win for both open source and WordPress2. Movable Type (MT) is currently only open source in the press release sense — I do look forward to that changing. Todd Cochrane, with his quick mind and wicked tongue, is a very welcome addition to the WordPress team.
The technical details of the problems Todd Cochrane documented are interesting though not as interesting to me as him not feeling supported by the Movable Type community and the company behind MT, Six Apart.
Before WordPress, I haven’t ever been part of a community of this size where people support each other so well, but don’t think that similar problems to Todd’s don’t affect WordPress. There are a lot of people that still feel outside, and we all can do something about this by lending more than our ideas — whatever you are good at or are interested in learning can help WordPress to be a better product and continue to have the best community.
Dan Kuykendall has done just that. He is the the author of PodPress, and he and his collaborators and contributors’ creation PodPress likely increases Todd’s frustration with MT — nothing bugs me as much as knowing that someone’s tool already has a feature I want3. I really enjoyed hearing him speak at WordCamp 20074. PodPress is a big reason why people choose WordPress for podcasting.
WordPress is the best blogging software there is, but it will only stay that way if we listen to the Todd Cochranes, welcome the Todd Cochranes, and thank the Dan Kuykendalls of the world.
There are many more Todd Cochrane and Dan Kuykendalls, though they tend to have different names. Are you one? What are your frustrations? How are you contributing? What are the barriers I can help remove?
- A Selection of the Most Blogged-About Books of 2005 [↩]
- Disclosure: I’m a paid, full-time contributor to WordPress. [↩]
- There is an interesting discussion on SixApart-ProNet that suggests that two separate “prominent MT plugin developers” provided quotes of $10,000 to “ape PodPress” in MT. [↩]
- Stephanie Booth’s wonderful coverage [↩]
There is an interesting discussion on SixApart-ProNet that suggests that two separate “prominent MT plugin developers†provided quotes of $10,000 to “ape PodPress†in MT.
To be clear, that was a reference to a claim originally made by Todd himself. The developers were not named, which I remain curious about, nor have “they” come forward, though one obvious(to me) candidate has already stated he was not among them.
Also, as I pointed out in that thread, don’t make the mistake of conflating a license fee with a development commission, unless you’re prepared to ask the PodPress dev what he would have asked for if someone offered to pay him to create the plugin rather than doing it on his own time.