In version 1.9 the Podlove Publisher featured a brand new "contributor" feature that allows podcasters to represent people and/or organisations in addition to all the other generic metadata of a podcast episode. Since the initial release we have provided 12 minor updates to the system and we have improved and extended the contributor feature in many ways.

It's now possible to assign contributors to both episodes and the podcast itself. Using the "Contributor Settings" menu you can also set up a default set of contributors to be included with each episode. This makes it easy to list everybody who has contributed in any way to your work. For Podcasts, the most personal medium on the Internet, this makes a lot of sense.

But many of you might have been confused by the option to also create a list of "groups" and "roles" and assign either or both of them to contributors. What is this all about? Well, let me explain.

While many people (or groups of people) might contribute to your work, there is some demand to properly express what kind of contribution it actually is and to decide which kind of support to show where and how. With "groups" and "roles" we give you flexible building blocks to make this work for your case. While the first version came with a set of "default roles" we have made a step back and now deliver Podlove Publisher with no default settings for either groups or roles as everybody will probably have a different approach to this and it is next to impossible to define a default set that works for everyone.

So what is a group, what is a role?

Groups are meant to express division of work on a podcast. Good examples for groups might be the people who are actually visible/audible on the show (group: "On Air") or the team that prepares the content ("editors") or takes care of the technical setup to make everything work ("backstage"). Once grouped, you can select which group to actually show on your website using the "group" parameter for the [podlove-contributor-list] short code.

Roles are meant to actually describe what kind of role somebody plays within the podcast. You could set up roles for "moderation" or "guest", there might be one for people providing "shownotes" or other things.

So by combining groups and roles you get a very powerful way to actually express contributions to your podcast. How you decide to use it is up to totally you. You can also ignore groups and/or roles and they will never show up in the user interfaces.

If you still have the set of default roles of our initial implementation show up in the roles list and you don't know how to use them: delete all of them and create new ones once you think you could benefit from it.

We are still not done with Contributors. They are going to be the building blocks for some cool future features and in the next release you will see some significant improvements to the user interface too.