PodHawk Podcasting to the world!

PodHawk 1.8 was released today. I have completely re-written most of the code.

The major changes are:

- PodHawk 1.8 uses PHP Database Objects (PDO) to manage the database. PDO is faster and more secure than ADODBLite. However, PodHawk will fall back to ADODBLite automatically where the PDO modules are not available.

- PodHawk 1.8 uses HTML Purifier to ensure that your postings contain only ‘good’ html, and that comments left on your site by listeners cannot contain malicious code.

- PodHawk 1.8 supports the latest version of the JW Player. This uses HTML5 to display a player on devices (eg iPads and iPhones) which do not support Flash.

- there is an improved (more secure) option to allow listeners to leave audio comments.

- a new Facebook plugin, to work with all the changes which Facebook have made in recent months.

- a new theme (Whitebrush) with many thanks to Falko Knizia

- a German language option for the backend pages – thanks again to Falko.

- you can store your audio and video files on Amazon S3. PodHawk will handle file upload and download. Your Amazon “bucket” becomes effectively an extension of the ‘audio’ folder on your server. This option is valuable where your web host restricts the download bandwidth from your site.

There are instructions for installation and upgrading in the download package. I now need to revise the Wiki, to include detailed information on the new features. This may take a few weeks. Please be patient!