Developer of PowerPress

I’m the lead developer for the PowerPress podcasting plugin for WordPress. Rather than give myself a slap on the back, I will use the review as an opportunity to explain the history of the plugin, why it’s trusted by so many podcasters around the world, and to ask for your review.

I started developing PowerPress in the summer of 2008 when PodPress, the popular WordPress podcasting plugin at the time was abandoned. Initially I tried to patch the bugs that existed in PowerPress but quickly came to the conclusion that it would be optimal to write a new plugin from scratch.

By August 2008 we had a working plugin and the rest was history!

From the beginning we set forth to fix many of the issues that existed with PodPress. In particular, PodPress had built-in statistics which were never accurate and caused server load issues. See, WordPress is a great platform for generating and displaying content, but it was never intended to data-mine or report. PodPress tried to support locally hosted podcast media files which resulted in many podcasters unknowingly serving large files on the same server as their primary web site causing site loading performance issues. PodPress never loaded PHP code wisely, loading all PHP files even when not in the wp-admin area. One of the worst features of PodPress was detecting the file size and duration which required downloading the entire file, which lead to very slow “verify” that would take minutes or even timeout. There were many more PodPress faults that PowerPress fixed or simply avoided in order to provide a 100% reliable podcasting plugin.

In 2008 Blubrry.com started offering free podcast statistics (a service for podcasting similar to what Google Analytics is for web statistics). If you need podcast statistics that provide realistic totals, please check it out. The free service will give you totals that factor for robots, crawlers, repeat requests, and many of the erroneous data that other apps and services wrongly report.

Development wise, PowerPress includes code that will detect the file size and duration efficiently, regardless of where the file is hosted. PowerPress does not load the admin php files unless you’re actually in the wp-admin, leaving only 1 to 3 php files that are loaded for regular pages depending on if you enable the players and subscribe options. If all you use is the RSS syndication features, then only the main powerpress.php file is executed on page loads. With PowerPress, server performance is not impacted by long executing PHP threads, no operations are made that are time consuming to page loads.

These are some of the important details that make PowerPress standout. With over 10 years experience developing technology for the podcasting industry, I will personally assure you that when you use PowerPress the features included are for good reason.

An important example of the features no one else in the podcasting industry puts much thought into are Subscribe Tools. For years we (Blubrry.com) recommended to podcasters to create a subscribe page to provide links to iTunes and to your RSS with basic instructions. In 2015 we took that a step further by providing a set of podcast subscribe tools that include iTunes, RSS, Subscribe on Android and more… for use on static pages, as sidebar widgets and below each episode.

Another important example is our Podcasting SEO options. Developed in collaboration with Daniel Lewis from Audacity to Podcast, these tools allow you to focus your podcast content separately from your blog/website content, giving you the freedom to have different web SEO and podcast SEO strategies.

One of the important aspects of developing open source is accepting suggestions and bug fixes from our users and giving them credit for their contributions. Take a look at our changelog to see the difference. The best ideas and solutions come from you, our users and we respect that.

If you’re a PowerPress user, I strongly encourage you to leave feedback for the plugin. This is your opportunity to thank everyone who has contributed to this great plugin.

Thank you!