Creating a podcast RSS feed

RSS feeds are designed for syndicating content. Popular with news sites and blogs, RSS feeds can also be used to syndicate audio. If you’re new to RSS, you can read all about it here.

There are two or three ways to go about creating your feed and it’s likely you’ll need to enlist a web geek to help you.

Get your CMS to do the work

Most open source content management systems provide plugins which will create an rss feed of podcasts if you configure it correctly.

WordPress
Wordpress provides a number of good options. A page of information can be found here.

Drupal
Much like WordPress, there are plenty of plugins out there. The first which caught our eye was FileField Podcaster. We’ve never used it. If you do, tell us how you got on. There’s a potentially a useful forum thread here.

Joomla
Joomla provides a 3rd-party plugin called the Podcast Manager. Again not tested by Radioplayer but scores highly in the reviews

modx
If you’re brave enough to use modx, then for those using Revo there’s a helpful blog post here which shows how to configure your instance. If you’re on Evo then a check in the modx forums will provide the answer.

Write a script

If you enjoy rolling up your sleeves and writing a bit of code, then you could build your own podcast manager in PHP or similar – or see if someone has written something before which you can adapt. You’ll need to ensure that the script outputs a valid feed. Watch out for unescaped and spurious characters and run it through the FeedValidator to make sure it’s right. You can also use CastFeedValidator or better still – use both. It’s vital the feed is RSS and not atom or something like that. Ensure the MIME type is application/rss+xml

What next?

Next you need to submit your feed to Radioplayer.

• Login to the Station Control Panel
• Locate your station from the list and click on it
• Click on the Audio tab and scroll to Clips, catch-up and On-Demand
• Enter the URL of your feed in the field shown – check it first in a browser to ensure it loads.
• Scroll down and click Save<

Advanced options

When a listener finds one of your clips in Search and listens to it, by default we will load the clip in your standard Radioplayer console.

We’ve extended the RSS specification to allow for a element. On a per clip basis, this element allows you to state the URL of the console which you want it to play in. This needs to be a full URL where a console can be found.

Want to learn more? Check out the PDF attached to this article. Click Here >