In the last 12 months our team has been hard at work creating a better podcasting tool for all of our users. We very much hope that has reflected in the functionality and support of the Seriously Simple Podcasting plugin that we all enjoy.
And today we’re taking another big step in that direction, with the launch of v1.19 we are bringing to Seriously Simple Podcasting a few really exciting changes.
New Name, Same Great Product
As you may have noticed this blog post is being hosted on castos.com – Castos is now the new main brand behind Seriously Simple Podcasting and is the name of our integrated hosting platform.
Don’t worry, nothing about the Seriously Simple Podcasting plugin is changing. It is, and will always be, absolutely FREE to use however you’d like. As are our add-on modules that extend the core functionality of Seriously Simple Podcasting. And it keeps getting better with each new release as we put more features and functionality into the core plugin.
But, with v1.19 we’ve taken the opportunity to rebrand what was previously Seriously Simple Hosting to a new name, Castos.
We did this for a few reasons, but the main over-arching theme of the rebrand is to allow us to help more podcasters easily create content and share it with their audience. The Seriously Simple Podcasting plugin and WordPress is obviously a huge part of that, but now our Castos hosting platform can be used by anyone….whether you’re a WordPress user or not.
With this change it is our hope to be able to meet the needs of really any podcaster, regardless of how and where they want to create their podcast content.
Speaking of podcasting content, the Seriously Simple Podcasting media player got a pretty nice makeover with v1.19 release too…
Two New Podcast Player Designs
Here’s a snapshot of the new player design that now come packaged with Seriously Simple Podcasting:
The Full Featured player includes your podcast cover image (which is pulled right from the Podcast -> Feed Details area in your WordPress dashboard) and has customizable colors for the background and progress bar.
This combination gives your media player the look and feel of one custom built to match your site’s theme and color scheme.
Existing Seriously Simple Hosting Customers
The natural question for customers of Seriously Simple Hosting is what changes for me? The answer is absolutely nothing. All of your podcast data and contents have already been moved over to the Castos hosting platform and you can log into your hosting account now via castos.com
Going forward we’re going to be introducing some really cutting edge podcast analytics back into the Seriously Simple Podcasting plugin, including playback level analytics. We’ll tell you not just where someone is listening from, but how long your audience is listening to each episode in the browser.
This playback duration data is already available for you in your Castos dashboard, via our embeddable player, but we’re working on bring this back into your Seriously Simple Podcasting dashboard in WordPress as well.
What’s Next For Seriously Simple Podcasting?
The Seriously Simple Podcasting team, which is 4 members strong now, has received a lot of great feedback from you our users as to things you’d like to see included in future releases.
Some of these will get rolled out here in the next couple of weeks, and some of them will require a bit more development time. But rest assured we are hearing you and please keep the suggestions coming either in GitHub or in the WordPress.org support forums.
And as always if we can do anything to help make podcasting easier for you please let us know!
