Phenomenal plugin

I had a vision where I wanted to create a “post” for each one of my podcast episodes. I had done this before, but I ran into a bit of a problem. The problem was that when you embed a player from a specific “service” on your site, if you happen to leave that service then the embed no longer works. Then you have the distinct pleasure of going in and manually updating every single embed you created on the site.

For instance, at first I was self hosted on my own website, this means that my iTunes feed, as well as all my embeds relied on the mp3 files on my server. Once I decided to host externally, I came upon the question of how to do this only once more without ever having to manually edit each page again.

So now let’s say you move to Buzzsprout, they give you the ability to embed their beautiful custom player into your posts. But if you ever leave their service, then its bye bye embed. It will break. Say you move to podbean, well, now you have to go and edit each post to reflect a new embed for that episode. If you have a lot of posts, that’s just very painful and there had to be another way.

Believe me, I tried this manual way, but it was just too painful, and then I realized, wait a minute, what if I switch yet again? I’ll have to repeat this laborious process once more!

At that point I had given up and decided that I would not create a specific post for each episode, but rather one page where I’d display all the episodes together. Then someone mentioned this plugin to me in a facebook group. I decided to check it out and I think this plugin actually meets my need.

See, like the builtin wordpress audio player, this plugin is a standalone plugin. The plugin itself uses the “feed” to pull in the episode embeds. So if you were to leave or switch to another service, you could just setup a redirect, which in theory should keep that existing embedded “feed” link intact and functional. Since you are not embedding from any specific site’s tool, but rather from a feed, as long as the feed works or properly redirects, your embeds should function.

I’ve tested this plugin using different feeds that all go to the same place to see if it still works and it really does. Since it pulls podcast episodes from the feed info itself, regardless of where you are hosting, the embed doesn’t break. That’s is fantastic!

Of course, you are now married to the plugin, but hey, it works great, it’s free and even if it were not free, I think its worth it.

There are a few things you have to configure every time you use the plugin on a page or widget as it doesn’t “remember” any of your configuration settings such as iTunes link, spotify link, social media links, etc. But it’s fairly easy to setup and works really great.

The only improvement I’d like to see would be if you could save those aforementioned settings so that you don’t have to look them up every time you setup the widget again. But that aside, I’m a really big fan of this tool and I highly recommend it. Also, it looks really good and is highly customizable. I love it. Great job Vedathemes, this is a winner!

• This topic was modified 4 years, 3 months ago by Angel Rodriguez.