Today the Castos team released several new updates to both our Seriously Simple Podcasting plugin as well as to the Castos hosting platform. Both of these give our users more robust functionality to both platforms as well as resolution to an edge case that we’ve seen a few times previously.
Also included are two GiHub Pull Requests from our users Tim Nolte and Roberto Garcia. If you have something you’d like to contribute to Seriously Simple Podcasting please feel free to submit a PR…we love getting them and love seeing what our users want to add to the plugin.
Adding Series Image thumbnail and Updates to Admin panel
Our first addition via Tim Nolte is to add Series Images to the Series List and making some updates to the Admin area.
In this we are including:
- A protected text domain unique identifier attribute to the admin class. Changes uses of the string found in the admin class to use the new protected attribute.
- Adds a metabox to the Series term add/edit forms for attaching an image to a series.
- Enqueues the WordPress media library editor only for the Series term add/edit forms.
- Adds a series image thumbnail to the series term list.
Thanks so much Tim for your contribution to the plugin and this great addition.
Adding “tracklist” parameter to [ss_playlist] Shortcode
Our second PR comes from Roberto Garcia adds a new parameter to the [ss_playlist] shortcode called ‘tracklist’.
With this addition after the player is rendered the code looks at the parameter “tracklist” to decide when to output the list of episodes below the player.
Thanks so much to Roberto for the contribution and this addition to the [ss_playlist] shortcode that so many of use.
New Shortcode
Starting with v1.19.6 of Seriously Simple Podcasting you will be able to embed either the compact or HTML5 player anywhere in a post via the shortcode. This shortcode will supercede the default location you have selected for the player in the Podcast -> Settings -> General area of your wp-admin dashboard.
If used the shortcode will insert JUST the media player (not the meta data or subscribe links associated with the episode) into any type of podcast post.
This is a great option for many depending on what their theme and post layouts are like and will give a lot of additional flexibility to allow users to place the media player not just at the top or bottom of the post.
Improved File Uploading
We have seen a few cases of a small bug in file uploading where file names with spaces or punctuation in the file name sometimes cause an issue with either playback of an episode or iTunes crawling your feed. With v1.19.6 (and a corresponding fix in the Castos dashboard if you’re not uploading your podcast files with Seriously Simple Podcasting) we have resolved this issue by removing any punctuation or spaces from a file name and have “slugified” the files and their corresponding URLs upon uploading to the Castos platform.
So, if you’ve been worried about this and were renaming your files then worry no more…now you can name your podcast file whatever you’d like and we’ll take care of making it perfectly compatible both for playback and in the eyes of iTunes.
More Updates Coming Soon
We have a few more exciting updates coming for both the Seriously Simple Podcasting plugin and on the Castos platform here in the coming weeks and are excited to share those with you.
If you have any input for us about things you’d like to see (or not see) in either the plugin or on the Castos hosting platform please drop a comment in below this post. We love hearing from you our awesome users and look forward to your input.
