Update: I've discovered that while what I did worked, it also cut out the stats somewhere along the line, so I've rolled back to my previous settings and I'll explore it more this week.

Podpress is far from perfect, but it's closer than many other podcasting systems out there. The developers have put a LOT of work into it, so much so I half expect them to begin spinning off their own blogging app. The fundamentals are all there, they just need to build their own system for handling posts and such. Not that I am recommending they do so, Wordpress is great, there is just so much code in this plugin that it is halfway there already.

For ManaNation though, I've been quietly hacking myself some custom features or abilities. Since ads are going to be a major revenue source, I wanted to open that door on their popup video player, I got some help on their forums and found the javascript which launched the popup player, then I modified it to show my logo and some ads.

That was all well and good until something better, and cooler, and ultimately more awesome, came along. Shadowbox.

I link-logged it yesterday during work and then last night I sat down and figured how to hack it into the system.

First, I installed and tested Shadowbox on the Wordpress installation. I chose to use the Yahoo YUI framework, uploaded the necessary javascript and css files, and linked them in the theme header. I tested a few links with the 'rel="shadowbox"' and sure enough it worked like a charm.

Next, I ditched Podpress' whole javascript popup launch, instead I created a php page which I called 'popupvideo.php' and had it create the same page I was generating through javascript, it also accepted a php variable (videolink) which it used in the wmv player to load the video for activex or the embedded player.

Third, I modified the code which generated the popup link (in podpress-theme.php) to instead create a shadowboxed link to the popupvideo.php file. This took some trial and error as I had to find the proper variable for the code "$val['URI']" which is the link to the media file.

Fourth, I fiddled with my page's design some. I'm still not totally happy with it, but I like it better. This way I don't lose visitors to new links, I can pop them up in site. Sure, some might find it annoying, but for my podcast audience I don't think many of them will be unhappy with the change.