Player widget?

yourbusybee, PowerPress is open source, you can use it and not use Blubrry Hosting. We would appreciate your patronage, by using our services you would support the company providing you the plugin. Plus it would make your production a lot easier as you can post, upload and publish all from your WordPress site, rather than going to multiple places. That truly is “simple and in one place” when you use Blubrry services with PowerPress.

You can always take baby steps and just use PowerPress just for the player functionality. I strongly encourage installing the plugin and taking a look at the features, I think you will find that you’ve been short changed on things such as advice on podcasting SEO, subscribe to podcast widgets, and other smaller details. All this is free, built-into the plugin. If find you love having everything within your site (like we do), you can sign up with blubrry and use the built-in importing and migration tools which makes any migration painless.

I can appreciate all that, and it’s possible I’ll be able to convince her to migrate, but truly, I’m having trouble getting anything working that she wants. The only widget I’m finding from Blubrry is for a Podcast subscription, and she wants to have a player as a widget, showing the last x-number of podcasts. Is that possible? What am I missing?

yourbusybee, it sounds like you are looking for the playlist player. In PowerPress Settings, go to the section titled “Advanced Options” and select the “Playlist Player” option, then click ‘save’. This will enable the playlist player. You can set a limit and specify other settings as well, here’s the documentation: https://create.blubrry.com/resources/powerpress/advanced-tools-and-options/powerpress-playlist-shortcode/

What is your production flow currently?

Are you posting your podcast episodes on your WordPress site? Each blog post has a podcast episode entry box, this is what all of the PowerPress features use to know what to display and how to display it. The Verify button gathers information such as the file size and duration (time in seconds) of each episode. You can also go into the Basic Settings tab of PowerPress and customize what fields are available in the podcast episode entry box. You can enable an embed box option and use an embed code from another service for each episode. You can select a sub option for that setting to let PowerPress know that you want this embed to be the default player (in place of the built-in player), which is useful if you are posting your podcasts to YouTube for example.

Right now my client uploads her podcast (mostly audio, no video) to Libsyn. Libsyn in turn pushes it to her WordPress site.

I will check out the playlist and these other settings you mention. Sorry for the newbie questions. I’ve designed and built a lot of WordPress sites, including ecommerce. But I’ve never had one for podcasts before so this whole process is rather new to me.

It sounds like what you’re hoping to do is use LibSyn’s on-post feature to automatically post to the WordPress blog and automatically populate the PowerPress Podcast Episode box. If that’s the case, it won’t work. Your client will still need to manually add the necessary information (media URL, etc.) to the Podcast Episode box.