PodHawk Podcasting to the world!

Disqus is a comment management system for blogs. You can use it instead of the PodHawk comments system if you wish. It is now fully integrated into PodHawk - there are very simple instructions in the PodHawk Wiki. And to prove it works, this site uses Disqus for all new postings, including this one, so you can see how Disqus works and feels.

I have released PodHawk 1.2 today. You can download it from Sourceforge.

The main new features are:

• the nice people at www.perlscriptsjavascripts.com have agreed that their upload.cgi script can be bundled with PodHawk. I have rewritten the configuration section of the script to make it easier and more useful for PodHawk users.
• improved options for post editing. I have integrated the Tiny MCE text editor into recording page 2, giving users a WYSIWYG option. I have replaced the old LoudBlog BBCode editor with a newer script which supports a greater range of BB tags (including smileys!) I have also integrated a simple BBCode visual editor. Markdown and Textile remain, and both they and the BBCode option support inline HTML. You can choose which editor to use for each post individually – PodHawk will remember which editor was used to create the post, and will automatically load it if you need to re-edit.
• when a new post is created, PodHawk will attempt to read the ID3 tags in the uploaded mp3 file and use them to create both a title and a text for the posting, which you can then edit further if you wish. Specifically, PodHawk uses the id3v2 ‘title’ tag to create the post title, and the id3v2 ‘unsynchronised lyric’ or, failing that , the ‘comment’ tag to create the post content.
• PodHawk now supports the Postgres8 database.There is a separate install programme (install_postgres.php) if you want to use Postgres. (There is still a small Postgres bug – the first attempt to add a new record eg to add a new category or author generates a database error. Second and subsequent attempts succeed. It is something to do with the primary key sequencer for the table. I need to investigate further.)
• php error reporting is on by default, but you can now switch error reporting off from the settings page.