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In August of 2015, I gave a session at Podcamp Pittsburgh X called Leveraging WordPress for your Podcasting Website.

WordPress has become one of the most popular blogging and content management systems on the web, and it’s become almost prolific in the podcasting community.

Why the heck not? With thousands of themes and plugins, free and for pay, available on the web, just about any functionality you could wish for could be easily fixed with the installation of a plugin.

There are many plugins, connectors, and themes available specifically for podcasters. Themes specific to media sites will usually include built in players. Give the post a media file URL and BAM! You have a player for your visitors on your site. This site uses such a theme, and often utilizes the built in player specifically for audio. There are plugins for publishing podcasts, plugins for SEO, plugins for stats, plugins for players, outside connectors for automatic publishing.

With all these options, there are plenty of ways a WordPress user could get themselves into trouble. Themes and plugins are silly easy to install, which means many users tend to just install away, never uninstalling or cleaning up that which they aren’t using. This adds lots of overhead to the site which can slow it down. There are also issues of security, some plugins aren’t compatible with others, some plugins are not properly developed, they can add overhead or security holes, and so on. The same goes for themes.

In this seminar, I cover this and I cover some of the more popular plugins and some awesome (and vetted) themes worth considering. For example:

  • Appendipity (Themes)
  • The Yoast Family (Plugins)
  • Wordfence
  • Mailchimp
  • Libsyn’s Podcast Plugin (in Beta)

Enjoy!