CS2: Podcasting in Community Server
Community Server has a whole lot of features, some of them are obvious like forums, blogs, photo galleries etc. There's also a lot of features that migh not be as obvious, and used together can accomplish some cool things. In this post I wanted to talk about Community Server's RSS feature and the possiblity to add files as attachements (in forums, blogs and file galleries), or files as direct links. Use them together to publish your own podcast!
My first approach when I tried this was to create a File Folder in my CS installation, I FTP:ed some mp3 files to my CS web, created entries for each of them with direct links in the newly created File Folder, and then subscribed to the File Folder's RSS feed in my iTunes. And it just worked! Pretty easy, right? On my podcast client I could also see the subject and body of each file entry.
There are also a couple of other ways to create your podcast feed. You could for example create a blog for it and attach your sound files to each post, and let subscribers add it's RSS feed to their podcast readers. Or why not create a forum for it. Whatever you feel is best for your needs. Using attachements in blogs, forums or file folders for your podcast feed might require some configurations though. Links to attachements usually shows up as a attachment/123.ashx link, which your podcast reader probably won't understand. But what you can do to fix that is to edit your communityserver.config and set:
enableDirectLinks = "true"
Also, remember to 'touch' your web.config so the changes in communityserver.config goes through.
Read more on this topic at CS.org.