Serhiy Zakharchenko

Hello @mborris,

If you check your podcast feed, the page content is clipped there – https://lemur.duke.edu/feed/podcast/aye-aye-pod/. It’s because you use excerpts for your episode description. To change it, please go to Podcasting -> Settings -> Feed Details -> eye-eye-pod, and change Episode description option to Post Content.

Best regards,
Serhiy.

Hello @2rovers,

I’m sorry to hear you encountered this issue. It looks like Bluehost removed this feature from their plugin. I don’t know why, so probably you can try contacting their support and asking how you can handle this option.

Meanwhile, you can try temporarily using the real file path instead. Here is the code snippet for it, you can put it into your functions.php file:

add_filter( 'ssp_episode_download_link', function ( $link, $episode_id, $file ) {  
   return $file;
}, 10, 3 );

Hope this helps, and please let me know what their support answered to you.

Best regards,
Serhiy.

Hi @thelugnutspodcastgroup21,

Please try the following steps:

1. Disable all plugins except SSP.
2. Make sure that the feed works properly.
3. Enable one plugin.
4. Check the the feed.
5. Enable second plugin
6. Check the feed…

Proceed till the feed stops working. This way you’ll know which plugin causes the issue.

Hope this helps,
Serhiy.

Hi @heiland,

Glad you managed to fix it!

Regarding your questions – the only server requirement is to handle virtual “*.mp3” URLs. If the file path does not exist, it should not respond with a 404 error immediately but should pass the request to PHP. This used to work on most servers, but recently, NGINX changed their default settings, requiring additional configuration.

Additionally, we’ve noticed that Bluehost doesn’t work seamlessly with our plugin by default. To resolve this, you need to uncheck “Skip WordPress 404 Handling For Static Files.”.

You can read more regarding the possible configuration problems in this article – https://support.castos.com/article/160-podcast-episodes-will-not-play#

Other than that, in most cases, SSP works out of the box with no additional setup.

Also, if you like our plugin and have a moment, we would greatly appreciate it if you could leave us review. Your feedback helps us continue to improve and also assists other users in discovering our plugin.

Best regards,
Serhiy.

Hi @thelugnutspodcastgroup21,

I’m sorry to hear you encountered this issue. It looks like WordPress cannot find the feed URL page, and redirects to the first similar page that it could find.

– Did it work before?
– If yes, do you remember after what changes or updates the issue occured?
– Did you try to update your permalinks? (Go to Settings -> Permalinks and click “Save settings” button.)
– Did you try to remove cache?
– Did you try to disable other plugins or temporarily switching to another theme?
– Did you try to temporarily changing your feed slug?

Hope one of these recommendations could help you to fix it or to narrow down the problem.

Please let me know your results here.

Best regards,
Serhiy.

@heiland

We use the virtual mp3 file approach for different type of tasks, for example to save the file listening statistic in the Stats plugin.

Did you try these troubleshooting steps?
https://support.castos.com/article/160-podcast-episodes-will-not-play#

If you don’t need statistic, you can try adding the following code to your functions.php file:

add_filter( 'ssp_episode_download_link', function ( $link, $episode_id, $file ) {
  return $file;
}, 10, 3 );

It will force SSP using real file path instead of the virtual MP3 file.

Hope this helps,
Serhiy.

Hi @heiland,

Sorry to hear you encountered this issue. The URL in the player is correct, and your server should automatically redirect it to the real file path. Unfortunately, some servers doesn’t handle such URLs correctly. Could you please share what hosting do you use?

Could you try adding the following code at the top of your .htaccess file?

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/podcast-player/([^/]+)/([^/]*)\.(mp3|mp4)$
RewriteRule ^ index.php?podcast_episode=%1&podcast_ref=player [QSA,L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/podcast-download/([^/]+)/([^/]*)\.(mp3|mp4)$
RewriteRule ^ index.php?podcast_episode=%1 [QSA,L]
</IfModule>

Best regards,
Serhiy.

Thank you @marcdk!

@marcdk

Thank you for bringing it to our attention, we’ll make those fields enabled by default in the next plugin releases.

Best regards,
Serhiy,

Hi @paspen18,

Sorry to hear you encountered this issue. This problem usually occurs when NGINX not sending the request to Apache if the URL ends with “.mp3”. Could you please share your website URL to take a closer look at it?

Best regards,
Serhiy.

Hi @odkr,

Sorry to hear you encountered this issue, and thank you for reaching out. I’ll work on reproducing the issue and will get back to you with the results later this week.

In the meantime, you might want to try rolling back to previous versions of SSP or Polylang to see if that resolves the problem.

Best regards,
Serhiy.

Hi @marcdk,

You’ll need first enable iTunes fields – go to Podcasting -> Settings -> General, check “Enable iTunes fields” checkbox, and save settings. After that, you’ll be able to setup the Episode Type on your episode page (iTunes Episode Type setting).

Hope this helps,
Serhiy.

Hi @briwatson,

Sorry you encountered this issue.

They refer to this episode – https://wbcommunity.org/podcast/words/. Currently, its file URL is https://wbcommunity.org/podcast-download/3043/words.1

Best regards,
Serhiy.

Hi @baxterburgundy,

That’s great, glad you managed to solve it!

If you like Seriously Simple Podcasting, I would really appreciate it if you could take a moment to leave a review. Your feedback helps us improve and also assists other users in finding our plugin.

Best regards,
Serhiy.

Hi @tamerax,

Based on the settings you provided, it should work, but there might be a bug causing the issue. Sorry, I’m not a server administrator and won’t be able to advice you here. I recommend reaching out to your hosting support for further assistance or hiring a specialist who can resolve this for you.

Best regards,
Serhiy.