podPress is a dead WordPress plugin that makes it easy to publish podcasts using WordPress, and I still use it on my podcast network, EasyPodcast. That is going to change once we deploy my own, custom built CMS, but I still have to use it for the time being.
This week I switched everything to HTTPS, feeds and media delivery included, and podPress started having issue in detecting the episode mp3’s file size and duration when I provided either an http or https link to the file.
This is due to a couple issues: it wasn’t recognizing HTTPS URLs, since it had an hard-coded check to make sure they were served over HTTP (I can see the point: you wouldn’t want to serve podcasts over FTP). Once I patched this, the file size detection started working again (it just reads the content-length HTTP header).
I was still experiencing issues getting the mp3’s duration: to do so, podPress downloads the mp3 (with curl, since it’s available on my server) and analyzes it using the getID3 library. However, I found out that for some reason the download file had the HTTP headers prepended to its contents, so the library couldn’t properly parse the mp3. It was due to a curl option in the code that enables that behavior. Why that was added to podPress and why it wasn’t an issue over HTTP is beyond me.
The two changes I made are both in the podpress_admin_functions.php file, and involved lines 1028 (to allow SSL) and 1618 (to prevent HTTP headers from being written to the file).
Here’s the diff file.