Recommend me a CMS for my video podcast

July 8, 2006 12:36 PM

I need a recommendation on what CMS / Blogging system to use for my video podcast. My big restriction: The main homepage of my site is flat HTML -- I want it to stay that way, but include a very abbreviated version of the blog (i.e., "links to the last five posts only") on it, via an iframe or something similar. What's the best system to use to do this?

I'm on Dreamhost, which installs Wordpress and Joomla automatically, but since what I want is pretty simple (basically just links to videos, along with comments and the sort of post-sorting ability a CMS gives you), I don't want to install more than I need.

Needs:

* As above, I need to be able to include a set of the most recent posts, and be able to arbitrarily customize which information is included. This means that I need a CMS which will a) allow me to make some PHP calls from my homepage to get the necessary data, or b) allow me to create my own, dynamic CMS page with the structure I need, which I would then include via an iframe.

* I don't want it to look or be structured like a blog. One of the reasons I'm apprehensive about using WordPress is that I'm not just publishing a blog with video links in it -- semantically, I'm publishing videos. I'd prefer that, instead of shoehorning the video posts into the blog format, the CMS had a posting format that was specifically suited to videos (i.e., instead of fields like "Blog Post Title" and "Blog Post Text", I want "Title", "URL" and "Description".) Finally, I'm going to need the CMS to also function to some extent as a video library, and the blog format is obviously unsuited to this.

* Flexible RSS generation -- I've had problems before using RSS generators that didn't allow me to customize them sufficiently, resulting in output that wasn't sufficiently podcast-like. (I'll be running the feed through Feedburner, so 90% of the feed perks I need will be handled there.) Specifically, I need to be able to customize the homepage URL, which Feedburner doesn't allow.

Wordpress seems like a pretty ok bet, but as I said above I'm wary of using a straight blogging client (unless I can customize it as specified above). At the same time, I'm wary of jumping right into Joomla, which I suspect could get pretty complicated. Any suggestions?

posted by tweebiscuit to computers & internet (4 comments total)

Why don't you use a service like Youtube to host your videos. They provide you with HTML code that you can use to embedd your videos into any webpage. You'll get additional marketing by having them searchable through Youtube as well.

Then just maintain a regular Wordpress blog (which you can customize to do whatever fields you like), and embedd your videos into it.
posted by fcain at 1:08 PM on July 8, 2006

Nope, YouTube is not an option. We encode our videos ourselves (YouTube looks like crap), and you can't podcast from YouTube. The problem isn't hosting the videos, though -- we've been doing that for years -- the problem is presenting them. Until now, we've done everything via flat HTML, because we weren't updating that often, but we're about to start posting three videos a week, and need a robust system for managing them that will also output an RSS feed, as well as let us include the five most recent videos on our front page.
posted by tweebiscuit at 1:15 PM on July 8, 2006

You could do this by using wordpress' "Links" feature, which could have a direct link to the podcast itself. Then you could just create a page that uses the wp_get_links command to get the 5 latest links added to the category called "Videos". You can even use images as previews.

For a great example of the links feature, take a look at http://www.mattbrett.com/ he has a great use for it in his music and video game review sections.

Imran
posted by CXImran at 2:23 PM on July 8, 2006

You might be able to hand-code the HTML and use RSSpect for, well, the RSS. The info on the site about podcasts seems like they're aiming their code squarely at iTunes, though, so I'm not sure how well it'd handle video podcasts.
posted by danb at 7:10 PM on July 8, 2006