Podcasting with newsticker

Additional duration support

The feature outlined here is not yet available in the stable MidCOM releases, but can be found from CVS.

The news listing component in MidCOM supports Podcasting, or posting file attachments into the RSS feed. To enable podcasting, a custom content schema is required.

To enable podcasting, add the following field to your the schema:

"enclosure" => array (
    "description" => "RSS enclosure",
    "helptext"    => "Use this field to attach MP3 or video files to the feed",
    "datatype"    => "blob",
    "widget_blob_simple" => true,
),

Once this schema is selected for use, an upload field for adding enclosures will appear in the news item editing form.

If you upload an MP3 file, several RSS reader applications like iTunes will be able to automatically add the file into their library and transfer it to a portable music player.

Additional duration support

In some cases, like when posting video clips to be displayed by a Flash application it might be desirable to also include information on the duration of the enclosure. This can be done by adding the following field:

"duration" => array (
    "description" => "Enclosure duration",
    "helptext"    => "Clip duration in seconds",
    "datatype"    => "text",
    "location"    => "parameter",
),

The entered duration will appear in the RSS feed in the following format:

<enclosure url="http://www.example.net/path/to/file.flv" length="1305031" type="application/octet-stream" duration="33"/>