Error in podcast feed

Hi,

I use Android BeyondPod podcaster, and it fails to read the podcast feeds created by SermonSpeaker. According to them, the issue is that there's a blank line before the "<?xml", and that's out of spec, so the Android XML parser fails on it.

Here is the response they sent to me when I brought this up:

---

If the XML declaration is included, it must at the first
position of the first line of the document.

====
Because each XML entity not accompanied by external encoding information and not
in UTF-8 or UTF-16 encoding must begin with an XML encoding declaration, in
which the first characters must be '<?xml', any conforming processor can detect,
after two to four octets of input, which of the following cases apply. In
reading this list, it may help to know that in UCS-4, '<' is " #x0000003C " and
'?' is " #x0000003F ", and the Byte Order Mark required of UTF-16 data streams
is " #xFEFF ". The notation ## is used to denote any byte value except that two
consecutive ##s cannot be both 00.
====

If the language of the spec is confusing, you can find a plain English
interpretation of the relevant portion here-

xmlwriter.net/xml_guide/xml_declaration.shtml

---

It would be great if you could address this please.

Thanks,
Bob

Actually, SermonSpeaker doesn't generate this line. It's more likely caused by a system or content plugin that generates bad code.
You can try it out by disabling all non-core system and content plugins and see if the feed validates then in feedvalidator.org/

Good suggestion!

I was able to quickly pinpoint the problem by selectively disabling plugins until the problem was resolved, using feedvalidator.org.

The problem goes away when I disable the "Facebook Like and Share" Content plugin. I'll report the problem to them.

However, another problem is then reported by the validator:


> This feed does not validate.
>
> line 39, column 2: href must be a full URL: / (10 occurrences) [help]
> <itunes:image href="/" />

What would cause this? There's a line like this at the end of every item in the feed. Is there a workaround?

Thanks,
Bob

I worked around this problem by specifying an image in the default options, but this looks like a bug in SermonSpeaker - please see if you can address it. Basically if there is no image specified, there's no need for this XML to be generated.

Yeah, this sounds indeed like a bug in SermonSpeaker.
There is a check if an image is specified, but it looks like the variable it checks contains a slash instead of an empty string when no image is specified. I have to look closer into that.
Thanks for sharing!

And I'll have a look if I can work around faulty plugins within SermonSpeaker. I saw that problem a few times already.

Found the problem. The check for the image was only made on channel level, not on episode level. Quite an easy fix

SermonSpeaker tries to add an image to the episode levels so it will be shown in iTunes. It will first search for a picture on the sermon and if there is none, it will take the channel picture (if there is one).
So to fix this problem you can indeed set a podcast logo in the settings (which is best anyway).
If for some reason you don't want a picture shown, you can use this fixed file:

Extract it and copy the default.php to /components/com_sermonspeaker/views/feed/tmpl/default.php. Overwriting the file already there.

Fix of course will be also included in the next release of SermonSpeaker.

However I didn't found a way to work around faulty plugins so far. So plugins which directly output anything (spaces, javascript code, ...) outside their scope will still mess things up. It's mostly caused by not using the Joomla functions for adding javascript code or wrong formatting of the file.