Captivate Sync

Description

Captivate Sync? is a WordPress plugin maintained and developed by Captivate, part of the Rebel Base Media family. With our background in Podcast Websites, WordPress development and podcast hosting, hundreds of independent podcasters trust Captivate Sync? and Captivate to power their podcast brands everyday.

Captivate Sync? is totally free to use and connects seamlessly to your Captivate podcast hosting account.

Captivate Sync? helps you to publish and manage your Captivate podcasts directly within your WordPress dashboard. It’s designed to save you hours of time and shave off the manual processes that come with running a podcast, so you can focus your energy on creating your show:

• Complete integration with Captivate, the world’s only growth-oriented podcast host
• Manage and display your podcast episodes inside your WordPress account
• Edit, view, share and delete podcast episodes from WordPress and see changes reflected in your Captivate dashboard immediately
• Use custom shortcodes and page mapping to decide how and where your episodes display on your website
• Easy, enhanced customizations and team settings to make managing a team or multipple podcasts a breeze
• Fully compatible with all major WordPress builders and themes

Full Captivate Sync? features

Show and episode-level podcast management

• Manage multiple podcasts and podcast episodes without leaving WordPress
• Publish, schedule, edit and draft podcast episodes
• Automatically insert the fully responsive Captivate podcast player wherever you need it
• Use custom page mapping to create bespoke website content that reflects your brand, business or network
• Choose whether to hide or display custom links and set bespoke calls to action
• Edit or disable your comments section

Easy enhanced customization with shortcodes

• Automatically embedding your podcast players has always been easy with Captivate Sync?, but now you have full control over how people listen to your episodes with our Shortcode builder.
• Use list view to display a feed-like list of episodes, or use grid view to choose either 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 column layouts to suit your website’s look and feel.
• Change your featured image and podcast player position to best suit your brand and theme
• Add custom CSS to your shortcodes for consistent branding throughout your podcast website

Customize your team settings

• Customize and restrict access to specific podcasts to stop certain users publishing or editing content
• Set default authors

Complete integration with Captivate, the world’s only growth-oriented podcast host

• Unlimited podcasts and uploads
• Distribute your podcast to Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon and all other major podcast platforms
• Fully responsive, customizable podcast players
• Free, built-in podcast websites
• Private RSS feeds on any plan
• Innovative marketing tools to help you grow and promote your podcast episodes
• One-click PDF sponsor kit
• …and LOADS more! Check out the full feature list.

How to install Captivate Sync?

Setting up the Captivate Sync? plugin is a quick process with just two steps. First, you’ll need to install the plugin, then authenticate the integration.

1. Install Captivate Sync? from the WordPress repository. Then, head to your Plugins tab, find Captivate Sync? and click Activate.
2. Head on over to your Captivate dashboard. Click My Account, and then click Reveal API key.
3. Back in WordPress, paste the User ID and API key into the relevant boxes within Captivate Sync?.

If you need more guidance, we’ve put together full instructions and video steps.

How to find help

For help with Captivate Sync?, take a look at the FAQs and step-by-step guides in our help section. If you can’t find the answers you need, reach out to us on the support forum or get in touch via the chat feature on the Captivate dashboard.

Support

https://help.captivate.fm

Twitter

https://twitter.com/captivateaudio

Screenshots

Installation

To install Captivate Sync? manually, please follow these steps:
1. Copy the directory from the zip file you have downloaded into the /wp-content/plugins/ folder.
2. Activate the “Captivate Sync?” plugin in your Plugin Management page.
3. Authenticate your Captivate Sync? plugin by going to the Captivate Sync? > Authentication page.
4. Once authenticated, go to Captivate Sync? > My Shows and select the shows from your Captivate account that you would like to sync to your website.

FAQ

What is Captivate Sync??

Captivate Sync? is our dedicated free plugin for self-hosted WordPress podcast websites.

Do I need a Captivate podcast hosting account to use Captivate Sync??

Yes. You can use Captivate Sync? either as a part of a podcast team or with your own Captivate account. For a full list of features, prices and to start a free 7-day trial, check out the website.

Can I manage all of my podcasting process from my custom WordPress website?

Captivate Sync? has been designed to work harmoniously synchronise your custom WordPress website with your Captivate podcast hosting dashboard.
You can create, schedule, publish and edit, all your episodes from your WordPress dashboard, and these changes will automatically update in your Captivate account.
There are some features that you will need to hop on over to your Captivate account for, including managing team members, billing changes and other account changes.

Why is my WordPress site not updating with new episodes?

While Captivate Sync? will automatically update your WordPress site with new episodes, occasionally you may need to manually reconnect the plugin to Captivate. This is super easy to do, and you can follow the steps to do that in our help articl

Won’t my custom WordPress website get bloated by all the mp3 uploads for my podcast?

Nope, not with Captivate Sync! Any file you upload and publish via Sync is still hosted on your Captivate account, so there is no extra files being added to your WordPress database.

Reviews

Badly coded – noindexed all our posts for months

lukascech November 21, 2024

I can’t believe how poorly this plugin is coded. It set <meta name=’robots’ content=’noindex’> to all our posts, even the ones without anything to do with podcasts. Blank overwrite of all meta tags to no index, our traffic was suffering for months, now we know why. This plugin doesn’t even have any settings, it doesn’t tell you it is noindexing everything, it just does it upon activation. That is very bad practice – to apply such a disruptive setting cross-site without a word of warning.Stay away from it.

Functional, but not impressed.

geektasticdad June 26, 2024

This plugin is functional, barely. It wasn’t compatible with my Avada theme, but to the credit of Captivate support, they logged in and made it work properly. They promised these compatibility issues would be addressed in the next version, but the plugin hasn’t been updated in a year. Not sure that this is a priority for Captivate. Had I known then what I know now, I might have gone with Blubrry instead of Captivate.

Almost good

jre1043 April 17, 2024

The idea is good but it’s just not ready yet. It doesn’t quite communicate with Wordpress so formatting between Wordpress and captivate do not show up correctly, so by using this you are essentially creating double or triple the work completely negating the sole purpose of making your life easier. Also the sync feature needs to be able to work just one way meaning you can bring in from sync but then have the freedom to customize the word press end without effecting the captivate side. Again this ties back to the fact that captivate and Wordpress don’t communicate well to each other so this just creates massive formatting issues, plus a lot of time you just want to be able to import your podcast quickly and efficiently and then have the ability to customize it only for the word press side.

Extremely disappointing plugin – avoid if you can

moderateparty April 13, 2024

This plugin technically works. It provides a player for each episode. However, it is extremely limited. It lacks support for custom fields and is essentially bricked – you can’t easily edit or style your episodes. They don’t even display a featured image — even though it shows episode artwork on the backend. When I was looking to switch my podcast host (previously using castos), one of the factors that lead me to captivate was the Wordpress Sync. But it’s pretty bad. With my previous host, I had much more control over my episodes and my website was something I’m really proud of. Since switching to captivate, I don’t feel the same. Really, really disappointed.

Works very well, looks great

Jesse Goplen June 17, 2020

I’m using this with seven podcasts on the same website right now, and it does exactly what it should. My next step is to style the custom post type it creates with Elementor and pull in those custom fields. I don’t foresee any problem with that since it seems to populate everything correctly when it publishes the episode, but I will try to update my review at some point once I’ve had some experience with that. Very impressed with Captivate and the plugin so far, super easy for multiple podcasts.

Beautifully Created Plugin

augamire November 6, 2019

I was just able to take a look at this & try it out. It’s AWESOME! It’s simple, straight forward, & saved me hours, possibly days, of time (THE most precious resource we have) trying to create my own podcast website page. This is a real value add – thank you!

Contributors & Developers

Changelog

3.0.0

• Released on 28/10/2024
• Overall User Interface updated
• Settings: Allow users to change single episode slug, category archive slug, enable or disable default archive page.
• Settings: Ability to display artwork in place of the featured image
• Settings: Ability to display season and episode number with the episode title
• Shortcode: Ability to select multiple podcasts and specific episodes
• Shortcode: Added title and read more link color options
• Shortcode: Added option to hide/show title
• Shortcode: Added option for featured image size
• Shortcode: Added option to change HTML tag for episode title
• Shortcode: Last generated shortcode will now be saved for later use
• Shortcode: Preview generated shortcode
• Shortcode: Episode featured image is now linked to the episode
• Shortcode: Added load more option
• Permalink redirect will now use the actual episode URL
• Added support for dynamic show notes
• Added duplicate episode feature
• Added ability to deactivate/activate episode
• Private, exclusive, and early access episodes will not appear on front-end queries and searches
• Add/Remove Podcasts now lets you set a default author for each podcast
• Manual sync for each podcast
• Clear auto-saved data for each podcast
• Implemented additional measures to prevent creating duplicate episodes, such as using additional unique identifier for each episode
• Podcasts database table converted to utf8mb4 (upon re-activation of the plugin) to store any Unicode character
• PHP version 8.0.0 compatibility
• Bug fixes and enhancements

2.0.26

• Released on 14/10/2024
• Removed iTunes Summary field
• Bug fix: Resolved an issue where the SEO Description field was not properly validating the maximum length of 300 characters, leading to a white screen error.

2.0.25

• Released on 07/06/2024
• Bug fix: Alternate RSS Feed will only appear on page mapped for each podcast
• Security Improvement: Addressed a vulnerability in the shortcode implementation

2.0.24

• Released on 23/04/2024
• Added support for og:audio on single episode pages

2.0.23

• Released on 06/03/2024
• Bug fix: Auto-sync via webhook not working correctly

2.0.22

• Released on 17/11/2022
• Bug fix: Transcript and episode-art upload issue
• Bug fix: Episode URLs trailing slash issue

2.0.21

• Released on 01/11/2022
• Bug fix: Open Graph image missing

2.0.20

• Released on 12/08/2022
• Bug fix: Transcription output issue when using the text version, changed to html

2.0.19

• Released on 27/01/2022
• Small minor fix

2.0.18

• Released on 12/01/2022
• Snippet editor has been removed from show notes field
• Improved saving of episode process to avoid duplication
• Small minor fix

2.0.17

• Released on 17/11/2021
• Excluded episodes from feed and Captivate sites will now set the episode to draft
• Set show_in_rest to true for block editors post type queries
• Bug fix: page mapping slug for Captivate feed URLs

2.0.16

• Released on 21/10/2021
• Bug fix: Page mapping conflict with Elementor
• Bug fix: 404 issue with single episode pages when using custom permalink structure

2.0.15

• Released on 08/10/2021
• Bug fix: Audio file upload

2.0.14

• Released on 30/09/2021
• Bug fix: Twitter card not recognizing the featured image
• New Captivate Player updates

2.0.13

• Released on 29/07/2021
• Shortcode featured image now linked to single episode page
• Bug fix: Not recognizing the episode show notes when Grammarly is enabled

2.0.12

• Released on 28/07/2021
• Updated show settings link

2.0.11

• Released on 01/06/2021
• Bug fix: Artwork file size error not showing if filesize is over 500kb

2.0.10

• Released on 27/05/2021
• Bug fix: Dropzone temporary fix is now removed and fully fixed
• Small minor fix

2.0.9

• Released on 18/05/2021
• Bug fix: Saving shownotes issue when using WordPress editor

2.0.8

• Released on 23/04/2021
• Added multisite support
• Auto-save bug fix

2.0.7

• Released on 14/04/2021
• Replace audio bug fix

2.0.6

• Released on 01/04/2021
• Small minor fix

2.0.5

• Released on 24/03/2021
• Small minor fix

2.0.4

• Released on 22/03/2021
• Small minor fix

2.0.3

• Released on 18/03/2021
• Added auto save to local storage for publish episode so they can get back with filled in details intact if the browser crashes, wordpress error, accidentally closed the browser, and other unforeseen disasters
• Added snippets feature
• Added transcript feature
• Remove authentication will no longer delete episodes from site (the episodes will still be re-synced) – this is for users who might need to re-authenticate
• Embedded player will now show a “Sorry, there’s no audio file uploaded to this episode yet.” message visible only for logged in users if there’s no audio uploaded yet instead of the “This podcast is no longer hosted on Captivate”
• Bug fix: Upload timeout limit set to 500 seconds

2.0.1

• Released on 25/02/2021
• We’ve stripped back the plugin and added extra theme support straight out of the box
• Added shortcode feature
• Added default author option for each show
• Added podcast management for non-admin users
• Added discussion section on episode edit screen
• Added new page mapping feature for usage with custom shortcodes
• Bug fix: new published/scheduled episodes will be pulled within 1 hour
• Bug fix: Upload Audio File button not working after updating to WordPress 5.6
• Bug fix: Unable to save draft episode without audio file on Safari
• Bug fix: Page mapped for episodes not showing the correct page title on some themes

1.1.2

• Released on 09/07/2020
• Small minor fix

1.1.1

• Released on 09/07/2020
• You asked for it, we delivered – clickable time stamps!

1.1.0

• Released on 02/07/2020
• The episode specific artwork now uses the WordPress media library for uploading and processing for better error handling on dimensions so when publishing it works much better.
• We’ve now got a debug mode so we can help debug any small minor sync issues, yay!
• Fixed a small minor sync bug when an episode status is different from Captivate to Captivate Sync.
• We’ll now alert you if there is something wrong with your MP3 file when uploading via Captivate Sync ??
• On new installations of Captivate Sync it will now run every 10 minutes to ensure no pesky episodes have been missed when published and scheduling dates is off.
• Fixed an issue with episode date and those pesky timezones.
• We’ve also done a full sweet and removed lots of unnecessary code, who else loves a clearout?!

1.0.12

• Released on 11/02/2020
• Added the option for a custom captivate.php page for styling inside your theme template.
• Also adding a single-captivate_podcast.php will style the single page for you devs out there.
• Small bug fix

1.0.11

• Released on 12/12/2019
• Happy holidays!
• Added option for WordPress WYSIWYG editor
• Added SEO title and description to episodes.
• Small bug fix

1.0.10

• Released on 28/11/2019
• Sets the default slug to /captivate-podcast

1.0.9

• Released on 21/11/2019
• Fixes an issue when creating scheduled or draft episodes

1.0.8

• Released on 20/11/2019
• Fixes an issue when creating an episode with the slashes in content
• Make the tagging system more similar to how WordPress works naturally

1.0.7

• Released on 18/11/2019
• Fixes an issue when you edit an episode it changes the slug after having it set.
• Adds an update to the Twitter card when sharing an episode.
• Sends the slug file both up and down to Captivate to ensure slugs don’t get compromised.

1.0.6

• Released on 15/11/2019
• Fixes an issue where the Sync was moving very quickly before WordPress saved the new post.

1.0.5

• Released on 06/11/2019
• If user is not logged in, redirect to authentication screen
• If user has no Captivate shows, give option to add a show
• Only users with the right access can trash items.

1.0.4

• Released on 04/11/2019
• Fixes an issue with Clipboard JS in queue

1.0.3

• Released on 04/11/2019
• Fixes an issue with Clipboard JS for older versions of WordPress

1.0.2

• Released on 04/11/2019
• Changes to WordPress readme file and include extra special asset

1.0.1

• Released on 04/11/2019
• Changes to WordPress assets and minor change.

1.0.0

• Released on 27/10/2019
• Initial release of Captivate Sync?