Best Practice Suggestions for Podcast/Blog combo?
I've got (and love) the audio module installed and working for the site I'm working on and am now wondering what the best mix of podcast/blog would be...
What I want is to create blog type content, sometimes with audio (i.e. podcast) and sometimes as a straight blog. Right now, I have two content types: audio & blog.
I'm wondering if I should morph the audio module/content type into allowing me to post non-audio blog type entries, stick with the two content types (each specialized for their purpose). I'm thinking from a usability perspective, my visitors will want to go to ONE place to see both; I imagine that could probably be done with views or something (forgive me, I'm very new to Drupal).
So, looking for some sage advice/recommendation from the Drupal community on the best way to approach this for me and my visitors.
Thanks,
Scott Gingrich
www.ultimatecrmguide.com <- site I'm developing
I've done podcasting a
I've done podcasting a couple of times and each time a different way. Each time I think I should just write a dedicated podcast module but then I can't quite grasp it since Drupal out of the box basically has everything you need - just not always in the exact packaging you might need.
The simplest approach is to just turn on file upload/attachments for blog types. You then create a blog entry as normal and upload/attach a file to it. Drupal automatically includes the first attached file in the feeds in generates as the enclosure. This would replace the need for the audio module but you'd lose features such as the id3 tagging and other stuff audio module does.
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Here is my most recent approach which is close to what you are already moving towards
Modules- Audio
- Video
- CCK
- podcast - small custom module used to create podcasts overview page, rss feeds, and episode pages for each podcast - views module could probably do this but it was easy for me to just create the views I wanted in my own module and allowed for some other customization I wanted anyway.
I created two new types using Drupal core content type creation
podcast
rename body to description
cck fields - none
podcast-episode
rename body to description
cck field - podcast - node_reference with allowed type podcast - this creates the podcast-episode/podcast association
cck field - enclosure - node_reference with allowed types audio and video - this creates the enclosure association
Creating a podcast is simple - create content - podcast - give it a title and description.
Creating episodes is pretty easy too - create content - audio or video. Next create a podcast-episode and choose the node of the audio/video previously created for the enclosure and the podcast previously created as the podcast.
You now have a node for the media itself and for the podcast episode and well as a node for the entire podcast.
Cons:
2 nodes - one for the media and one for the podcast episode
More setup required to create new content
Pros:
2 nodes - you could easily put the same audio or video into a different podcast if your site had more then one or in some entirely different content scenario.
Media nodes take advantage of full audio and module feature sets
You could take this approach by simply adding node reference cck field to your blog content type or create a the podcast type as I suggest and keep you podcast and blog as two separate feeds and pages on your site.
Hope this helps. Ask more questions if you need more to go on.
dLd
Another option is to use
Another option is to use audio and video nodes as the blog entries and tie them together into a single podcast/rss feed using taxomomy. That is, create a category or free tag that you use on every audio and video node you want to group together. taxonomy module then handles the feed creation and the video and audio nodes should take care of making sure the enclosure information is set.
Like I said, drupal has it all, just a matter of how to package it up the way you want.
dLd
Liking that method
Ya...in my playing around, I'm thinking that I may use taxonomy to bring it together...that way each node can be all it can be and tie it together with taxonomy. I'm about 2 weeks new to Drupal and all I can say is WOW what a fantastic product...well done!
Scott
FileField Podcast
There's a new module out that does a great job of building a Podcast feed using Views, CCK, FileField, FileField Meta and GetID3. Works like a charm and is well documented. Soon to be released as 1.0. Saved my day :)
http://drupal.org/project/ffpc