I have a podcast website (but unfortunately, there have not been any new episodes in years). When I first started my journey into podcasting, I was wondering how to best set a site up. If you want to keep it really simple, you don’t need any plugin for a podcast. Since WordPress can embed audio files, you could just upload the podcast episodes into your media library and embed them into a normal blog post. But if you want to allow users to subscribe to your podcast, add transcriptions or subtitles, have a nice web player with more option, and other typical podcast features, you may want to use a proper plugin to help you.
What does Podlove Podcast Publisher do?
There are multiple plugins under the Podlove brand. The major on is the Podlove Podcast Publisher plugin. There is also the Podlove Web Player, but this is optional, if you use the publisher plugin. The publisher adds a new custom post type “episodes”, where all the content work is done. For each new episode of your podcast, you would create a new entry here. You should configure the settings of the published before you add your first episode. This is described in a short video on the Podlove documentation page.
One of the cool features of Podlove is the fact that you don’t need to store the files on the same server as your WordPress site. You can have them on an external server, or even on an S3 storage, as long as you can control the file names. You set the base path for the episodes, and as long as Podlove will find filenames like episode-name.mp3, episode-name.m4a, episode-name.chapters.txt, episode-name.vtt, and so on, those external files work just as good as files on the same server. This means you can even use one of these (premium) podcasting services and still (also) host the podcast on your personal website.
Besides episodes and the descriptions, Podlove Podcast Publisher can manage other things a podcast would need:
- RSS feeds (to subscribe to your podcast)
- Contributors (hosts and guest, including descriptions and link to social media profiles)
- Donation links (for hosts and also guests)
- A extensive web player with controls for speed, transcripts and subtitles, download buttons, etc.
- Integration to external services
- A subscribe button/widget
- and much more …
On integration is with the Auphonic project. I do use this project to enhance the audio quality of the audio and video productions and Podlove can send all your files to Auphonic, have it optimize the files, and store the optimized files back on your server. But I have not used the integration, yet.
Why do I use Podlove Podcast Publisher?
Creating a podcast takes more than just speaking into a microphone, especially, when you are the person responsible for the post-production and publishing. Since I took that role for the podcast I co-hosted, I wanted to have a plugin that would support me as much as possible. If all the features Podlove is offering, it made the process really easy, after the first setup, and publishing a new episode was as easy as publishing a blog post. Using the template feature of Podlove made it even easier.
Conclusion
If I’d start a new podcast today, the Podlove plugin would be the first one I would install. I have not seen a second plugin that comes even close. And since I like the idea of “owning my files”, I love the possibility to have them on the same machine, while still being able to move them to an external storage any time, without any interruptions.
Do you have a podcast? Then why not share them here to get more subscribers? And if you use WordPress for your podcast, how do you manage it?