Features
PodHawk has everything you need for a successful podcasting website :
- a validated podcasting RSS feed, which your listeners can use to subscribe to your podcasts in iTunes or any other podcatcher.
- webpages built with the Smarty templating engine. Smarty has many advantages including :
- templates can be re-organised or re-written without altering the underlying php code. The PodHawk templates are divided into modules to make it easy to add or remove features, or to change their position.
- powerful conditional ("if...") and looping ("foreach...") tags make complex page presentations easy to programme.
- caching of web pages and the RSS feed means faster downloads and less work for your server.
- within each PodHawk "theme" you can have as many different web-pages as you want. The Smarty variables are available to all of them, so you can design pages to display your posts in different ways
- PodHawk/Smarty plugins extend the features available to your webpages.
- a range of Flash player designs for your web pages including the classic LoudBlog players, all the EMFF players, and a player from 1 Pixel Out.
- support for the JW Player which plays .flv and .mp4 videos, playlists, YouTube videos and streaming video.
- audio and video players are configurable from your backend (admin) pages.
- facility for your listeners to leave comments, including - if you wish - audio comments.
- choice of the classic LoudBlog antispam feature; the sophisticated Akismet anti-spam service, which is widely used on WordPress blogs; or the Disqus commenting system.
- counting of downloads from the website and from the RSS feed. (Note : you must be able to place a .htaccess file in the root directory of your PodHawk site in order to count downloads from the feed, and downloads of most video files).
- audio and video files can be uploaded by ftp, cgi or Flash uploader.
- an image manager which will upload images to your site, allow you to resize or rename them, and will even write the html needed to place them on your web page,
- A choice of Textile, Markdown, BB Code or the Tiny MCE text editor to make the job of writing your posts as simple as possible.
- facility for tagging and categorising your posts
- facility for pinging major weblog services and for sending a tweet to Twitter whenever you put a new post on air.
- an option to create a Facebook application which runs from your Podhawk site. Facebook users who authorise your application can share your podcast mp3s with their friends and add your podcasts as an application tab in their Facebook profile. See this example application
Requirements
- an Apache webserver. For download counting from the feed, mod_rewrite needs to loaded, and your Apache configuration needs to support .htaccess files. (Ask your web host or server administrator about this).
- Podhawk 1.6 and later versions requires php 5 or later. (If your server has php 4.3 or later, you can install PodHawk 1.53).
- a database - either MySQL, SQLite or Postgres8.
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