How does Powerpress handle old PodPress fields

This support document covers migrating from podPress to PowerPress:
https://create.blubrry.com/resources/powerpress/advanced-tools-and-options/migrating-from-podpress-to-powerpress/

If that doesn’t give you the answers you need, please go here:
https://www.blubrry.com/contact/
Click the Select link underneath All Other Inquiries and choose Technical Support. Fill out the form with your questions and someone will get back to you with assistance.

Hi Shawn,

unfortunately, that document isn’t a helpful guide anymore because it requires podPress to be an installed and active plugin to do the migrations. podPress is not installed on those sites, and likely hasn’t been for more than 7 years, possibly longer.

iirc, podpress became incompatible when WordPress versions 2.5-2.7 came out (somewhere in there), and was eventually removed from the WordPress Plugin repository with a year of that for no longer being maintained or supported.

That means that podPress would not work with WordPress 5.x, even if it could be downloaded from someplace safe & secure to even try ??

I will try to collect some more data so I can better ask my questions via the Contact form. I don’t have access to the databases for those sites, but I know what to ask the admins to query for that podPress data.

Hello @fpmsummer

The post Shawn pointed to should get you going, if you don’t have PodPress anymore then that first step to disable PodPress is not necessary, simply enable PowerPress and we will pick up the old PodPress episodes, and if you want to edit the PodPress episodes, do the migrate option described on that page then you can edit them with PowerPress.

The 3 step procedure on the page Shawn listed to setup PowerPress before disabling PodPress is to make sure there is a clear cut-over between the plugins with zero down time. If you disable PodPress then enable PowerPress, that window of time someone may not find your podcast. In other words, its the most optimal way to switch over, not the only way.

In more detail
PowerPress will read the existing PodPress data by default. There’s no need to re-enable PodPress or anything. In this scenario, you cannot edit the old data because it is still in PodPress format. PodPress stores values in the custom fields with a ‘_’ prefix to the field name which makes the field hidden to users (does not appear in the WordPress custom fields). If you browse your database with phpmyadmin you can look at the postmeta table for PodPress fields. The data is there it is just not accessible from the custom fields in WordPress because of the prefix.

The link Shawn pointed to, second section “Migrate episodes from PodPress to PowerPress and WordPress”, this will import the PodPress data and save it in the default WordPress custom field “enclosure” (this is how PowerPress stores your episodes. The advantage is once this is imported, you can view the field in the WordPress custom fields. Keep in mind that you will only be able to edit the first 3 lines. The 4th line is serialized, if you modify it directly without understanding how the data is serialized you could loose this data.

To import your podPress episodes, go to the Tools sub menu on the left and then select “Import PodPress Episodes”. Any errors will be displayed if there are any here. Once you have your episode data imported, then you can edit the episodes with PowerPress, or as i noted above, use the custom fields option in WordPress, just do not modify beyond the 3rd line.

Thanks,
Angelo

Hi Angelo!

This isn’t a new migration… this is a cleanup of sites that have been around a long time, and the hope is that cleaning up the old data will get rid of some DB problems that exist, affecting site performance.

All these sites have been using Powerpress exclusively for 5-7 years, and are running current versions of WordPress and other plugins. There’s been no podPress presence in at least that long.

Those instructions say that Migrate only works when both Powerpress and podPress are active, which is something that literally cannot happen anymore because of podPress’ age (will not run on WP 3.x or newer). The instructions also indicate that in the case of podPress being unavailable, the process is to use Import instead.

I had started the Import process, just to see what it would give me, and it does display a LOT of errors, saying I need to create multiple new custom feeds before I can continue because many of the posts have multiple enclosures (which they shouldn’t)… and since creating additional feeds is not an option, I abandoned the import.

I don’t have access to phpMyadmin on these sites, so I’m kinda flying with half a wing trying to fix this.

The other problem is that even with some sort of automated update of the old podPress data, there are still a lot of episodes that have podPress data that aren’t being read by Powerpress anymore, and those posts are just “missing” the podcast data.

They just disappeared after a recent update (not sure if it was a WordPress or Powerpress or ACF update, but the players were there one day, then the next day, over 100 episodes no longer had players or any media enclosure data at all).

Yes, most of the episodes throwing errors about multiple enclosures are ones we’ve gone in and manually added the media data to Powerpress after the episode disappearances, to get them active again in the meantime. Which seems to suggest that the podPress data may still be in there, and us adding the Powerpress data to a post that LOOKS like it has no media data caused the errors about multiple enclosures… or something.

Is it possible to create a filter or other code snippet to make the podpress fields visible? That could resolve a lot of what I’m fighting against here… it would allow me to see the data when I’m editing the episode, so I can copy the data over to the Powerpress metabox, then also delete those fields from inside the post to clear them out once I’ve finished the data copy.