If you’ve been looking for a decent WPMU-compatible tool for podcasting, your answer is here. The Blubrry PowerPress Podcasting Plugin is a free, open source tool made by and for podcasters.

This plugin has been thoroughly tested with WPMU and the developer claims it as as one of the advanced features of the plugin. If you’re looking to attract more vloggers and podcasters to your blogging community, this is one tool you cannot live without. Never underestimate the power of a viral video clip or popular podcaster. Monetizing your blogging community could be as simple as tapping into your bloggers’ talents and making multimedia posts a possibility for them. Multimedia blogging is a key factor in social media optimization, because any content that is good is very likely to be shared. When people share your bloggers’ content among friends and associates online, it generates links back to your site and establishes your blogging network as a source for valuable or interesting content.

PowerPress Features Include:

• Full iTunes Support: Adds iTunes compliant podcast feeds to your WordPress blog.
• Integrated Media Players: Audio/video web players with video embed support from sites such as YouTube and Ustream.tv.
• Modifiers: Easily add, modify and remove podcasts form blog posts and pages.
• Migration tools: Quickly migrate from PodPress, Blogger or Movable Type without losing episodes.
• Multi-podcast support: Create separate podcasts by category (category casting) or by media format.
• Supported Media Formats: mp3, m4a, ogg, wma, ra, mp4a, m4v, mp4v, mpg, asf, avi, wmv, flv, swf, mov, divx, 3gp, midi, wav, aa, pdf, torrent, m4b, m4r.
• Integration: Synchronize with Blubrry’s Free and Premium media hosting and statistics services.

Media Player Options:

PowerPress also comes with five audio mp3 players to choose from when displaying your podcasts:

If you’re migrating from PodPress, all you have to do is install PowerPress, Configure the “PodPress Episodes” setting in PowerPress to “Include in Posts and Feeds”, and then disable PodPress. It’s that easy and you won’t lose any of your episodes.

PowerPress iTunes Support and Features:

The ability to tag and categorize videos and podcasts within WordPress is really important for increasing their exposure to search engines and social networks. This plugin supports that need by providing category casting and tag casting, which also adds iTunes compliant attributes to tag feeds. If you’re offering podcasting capabilities as part of a paid blogging service, then you need a plugin that will help your users comply with iTunes listings, tags and file formats, since iTunes users are the overwhelming majority of many successful podcasts. PowerPress also allows you to upload artwork to iTunes from directly from within PowerPress settings.

The episode entry box is shown above. As you can see, it’s very simple to post media through Edit Post screen. If you’re looking to add podcasting capabilities to your blogging network or your single user blog, PowerPress makes it very easy to get off the ground without having to worry about all of the technical requirements for interfacing with the necessary third parties that make a successful podcasting engine. You can find more information about the plugin’s extensive features and download it at the WordPress repository.