Adding enclosures to WordPress

After successfully recording, uploading, and linking to the inaugural podcast, I have added the enclosure mod to WordPress. If you are subscribing to this blog through an RSS reader like bloglines, this revision may have caused my last 10 posts to show up in your feed reader again. Sorry about that, but in exchange for the inconvenience, I will offer a brief description of the WordPress enclosure mod installation, a process I found almost ridiculously easy:

1. Add fields to the wp_posts table. A file, wordpress_enclosures_mod.sql, is included in the download, so you can just cut and paste the commands into MyPHPAdmin (if you have access to that tool – it will also work from the command line, if you don’t have MyPHPAdmin).
2. Copy edit-forms.php, edit-forms-advanced.php and post.php to your wp-admin directory. You will need to overwrite the existing files, or if you already have so modifications to these files, you’ll need to make the necessary changes with your fave text editor.
3. Copy wp-rss2.php to the wordpress root directory.

And that’s pretty much all there is to it. You will notice that your posting form now has a new section called enclosure, with three fields.

1. Enclosure url is the url pointing to your audio file with the podcast on it.
2. Enclosure type is the media type for your file (probably “audio/mpeg” for mp3 files – don’t put the quotes in the field, by the way).
3. Enclosure length is the size of the file in bytes (at least that’s what I did and it hasn’t blown up so far.

That should do the trick. Now go get podcasting!