Adding audio to a Dotclear site: feeds, theme templates and the API
Dotclear runs many blogs and association sites across the French-speaking world. Here is how to add an audio version of your posts, what this engine makes easy, and its real limits, stated plainly.
Dotclear holds a quiet but stubborn place in the French-speaking web: this open-source blog engine, born in France in the mid-2000s, still runs personal journals, association sites and professional blogs that value its lightness and independence. The question of an audio version comes up here as it does everywhere, but Dotclear has its own logic, and ignoring it wastes time. Here is how to go about it, without overpromising.
Two ways to feed the narration
To produce the audio of a post, WeDispatch needs access to its text. On Dotclear there are two routes, and the right one depends on how you work.
The first goes through the syndication feed. Dotclear generates RSS and Atom feeds natively, for the whole blog and per category. This is the simplest path: you provide the feed address, narration triggers on each new post detected, and nothing changes in your admin interface. We described this principle in detail in adding audio through an RSS feed, and it holds for Dotclear as for any engine that exposes a clean feed. The one precaution is a Dotclear setting: the feed must carry the full post content, not just an excerpt, or the audio will only cover the teaser. That choice lives in the blog preferences, on the line that decides whether feeds serve full text or truncated text.
The second route goes through the API. If you want to trigger generation at the exact moment an author publishes a post, rather than at the next feed poll, a call to the WeDispatch API does the job. It takes a little more setup, but you gain responsiveness. The API and CMS page details what the interface allows, and on Dotclear that call can live in a small custom plugin or in a script fired at publication.
Placing the player in the theme template
This is where Dotclear differs sharply from WordPress. Dotclear runs on themes made of template files (files in .html format that describe, with Dotclear's own template tags, how a page is built). To show the audio player at the top of your posts, you do not install a ready-made extension: you add a fragment to the template that renders a post, usually post.html in your theme.
In practice the WeDispatch player slots in as a block at a chosen point in the template, most often just before the tag that outputs the post body. Because the template is shared by every post, the change is made once and applies everywhere: no per-article handling. One tip that avoids a nasty surprise at update time: duplicate the default theme and work on a copy rather than editing the original theme, so your change survives the next engine update. That is Dotclear's equivalent of a child theme.
Making use of categories
Dotclear structures content in categories, and that structure is an asset for audio. You can decide that only part of your categories gets narrated: the in-depth analysis and features, say, rather than the short news items or internal notes. By tying the feed or the API to specific categories, you narrate what has real shelf life and real listening value, without spending on content that does not lend itself to it. That logic carries into the rendering, where each category can get its own treatment, a voice for instance: our sections feature is built for exactly that.
The real limits, stated plainly
Dotclear has a plugin system, but we do not publish a ready-made Dotclear extension. So there is no "install in one click" module as on WordPress: integration goes through the feed, the API, and a template edit. For someone who knows their Dotclear theme, that is a short job. For a site left without technical maintenance for a long time, plan on help from someone comfortable with templates.
Another thing to watch: older Dotclear blogs sometimes run on dated versions or heavily customised themes. Nothing blocking, but it means you should look at your installation before announcing a timeline. The good news is that the syndication feed works almost everywhere, which always gives you a simple fallback.
Where to start
The fastest path is to start from the feed for a first listen, without touching the theme: you check the voice quality on your real posts before investing in the player integration. This step matters especially for a French-language site, because it is the reading of French that makes the difference, and that is the problem we work on first, as the French text to speech page explains. Once convinced, you add the player block to the template and, if you like, move to an API trigger for responsiveness. Each step is tested before the next, and the principle of installing without touching the rest of the site is the same one described on the WordPress page.
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