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Posts Tagged ‘ISAPI’

PodPress Premium Content Issues Explained

Filed Under : Coding and Hacking,Featured Articles by Chris Miller

Mar.17,2009

A good friend has been having an issue setting up their podcast for premium content using the podPress plugin for WordPress. After a bit of digging, I’ve found a couple of interesting things which point to why it’s failing.

podPress depends on PHP being installed as an Apache module, rather than running as a CGI, because it uses the HTTP authentication headers to log users in to WordPress before generating the premium feed.¹ Unfortunately for my friend, her host (Dreamhost) is running all PHP instances as CGI for security reasons. Once upon a time, they would let users turn this off and just run as a module, but those days appear to be long gone.

Podpress is looking for the HTTP_AUTHORIZATION header in the request headers for the premium feed. I found this odd, and am now wondering how old this code is. The docs list the proper $_SERVER variables as PHP_AUTH_USER and PHP_AUTH_PW. I cannot find another reference for the HTTP_AUTHORIZATION headers except for use in IIS:

Another limitation is if you’re using the IIS module (ISAPI) and PHP 4, you may not use the PHP_AUTH_* variables but instead, the variable HTTP_AUTHORIZATION is available. For example, consider the following code: list($user, $pw) = explode(‘:’, base64_decode(substr($_SERVER['HTTP_AUTHORIZATION'], 6)));

Why is the code in podPress IIS specific? That’s a little weird.

Anyway…in the current state, it seems impossible to use podPress’s support for premium content on Dreamhost. If you;’re planning on launching a poscast with premium content, be sure to test this on your host. YMMV.