In this video, we will create a view for our podcast. We will create a page so that visitors can listen or download the podcast on our site, and we will create a feed that users can subscribe to, or that we can send to FeedBurner for enhancement.

Create the view

  • Go to "Structure => Views => Add new view"
    • View name: Podcast
    • Show: Content of type Podcast Episode
    • Page:
      • Display format: without links
      • Create a menu link
      • Include an RSS feed
        • Feed row style: Podcast Episode
        • (Continue and edit)

Ok, so, we've got our page that will list the teaser view of our podcast episodes. (Remember, we configured this in Part 2).

Let's save the view and take a look at the feed:
Down at the bottom, we have our preview of the feed. You'll see the formatting is taken care of, and the iTunes info is already there for us.

  • The title is Podcast (We'll change this in just a minute)
  • The link is pointing to the podcast page we created with this view
  • The description is blank (We'll take care of that too)
  • The language is english
  • And we don't have any podcast items, even though we just created an episode. (We'll take care of that in a minute too.)

First let's update the title and description.

  • Title:
    • The title is actually pulling from the title of this view, so if we scroll up, we can click on "Podcast" and enter a new title.
      • Title: Super Sweet Awesome Podcast (a little tribute to Matt Farina there)

Now, our preview has the updated title

  • Description:
    • The description is taken care of in the format settings. So, scroll up and change the format from RSS Feed to Podcast Feed, and enter an RSS description.
    • Format: Podcast Feed
    • Description: This is the best podcast you'll never listen to.

Now when we check our preview, the description has been filled out as well. (Don't worry about the "& #039;" in the place of our " ' " (apostrophe) this will actually show up as an apostrophe.)

Now let's make it show our episodes

  • In order for it to pick up our episodes, we need to add the "Podcast File" field.
    • Add field: Content: Podcast File
    • Don't worry about changing any of the settings here. It won't make a difference anyway.

Now when we scroll down, we have a lot more information. You can see that we now have an (this just denotes an episode). The item has the title "First Episode", it links to the episode page, includes the description (which is what we typed in the body field. Again, don't worry about this, it will look fine.) It has the pubDate (when it was published), shows that it was posted by Brian, and thanks to the amazing work of getID3, the enclosure url, length, type and duration are all automatically filled out for us. We're missing the iTunes:author tag, this is actually pulled from the metadata of the file, and I'll show you how to add this in just a minute. And finally the iTunes subtitle and summary are both filled in with the body of the episode.

At this point, we could submit this to iTunes, and give out the feed address for people who don't use iTunes (thought there are a couple of more steps I highly recommend doing first). In part 4, we'll test our feed in iTunes, and I'll also show you how to edit the metadata of your files to include artwork and other metadata tags.