After a series of significant but officially “minor” releases in the 1.9.x branch we are proud to announce that version 1.10 of the Podlove Publisher has seen the light of day and while the release notes might not strike you as particular revolutionary, it has been one of the most effortful and sophisticated updates yet.

Let us introduce you to the new features we have baked for you.

New template system

At the center of this release is a completely reworked template system. Podlove Templates are made to create well-defined automated appearances for episode postings and pages but their capabilities have been limited so far as they were just static blocks of code that were able to insert information here and there.

No more: we have now integrated the Twig template engine into the Publisher. This enables much more complex templates than before as we are also exposing the podcast’s metadata via an internal API to the template system. You can iterate over internal data structures and optionally include or exclude information depending on other values! It is really, really flexible.

We have also replaced all internal code for generating lists and other things invoked by our internal shortcodes with the new template language. So we are eating our own dog food here to make sure the new API makes sense to everyone.

Advanced users should be able to come up with new styles of lists and overviews for their podcast content to accommodate their needs. Templates can be shared with other users so we are expecting a vivid exchange of nice templates among podcasters. Let us know if you have made a nice template that others might be interested in!

Along with the new template system come a lot new shortcodes that you can you use to create overview pages. [podlove-feed-list] creates a list of all your podcast feeds and [podlove-episode-list] generates an archive page of all episodes for you. Similarly [podlove-podcast-contributor-list] lists all the people behind a podcast. There is more to explore. Read more about it in the template documentation.

Other changes

One of the more visible changes is the new input method for social media accounts and donation buttons. You can now create a list of accounts and change the order among them. We have significantly extended the list of supported social networks, contact addresses and creative platforms and you can even add multiple accounts per network (if you like).

Social media accounts and donation information can also be applied at podcast level in addition to contributors alone. This allows a more logical specification of meta data and together with the new templates, you can make more parts of the website auto-generated including team and donation pages. It’s a treasure hunt.

Turn to the release notes for the full monty. There are a ton of small fixes regarding better usability, clarification of texts, slightly tweaked UI behaviour and other niceties that are usually not worth talking about individually but that make for a much better overall user experience. We like it cosy.

Our Roadmap

We have spent quite a lot of time thinking about our roadmap for the Podlove Publisher. Nothing is set in stone, but we have a plan. For the next releases we have taken aim at few “big" features that many people have been asking for (including ourselves).

A big focus is the Podlove Web Player. It hasn’t seen much love since version 2 but we want to take it to the next level very soon. We are working on a thorough technical and visual redesign that enables fancy stuff like embedding and displaying sophisticated timeline-based metadata. We think some minds will end up being blown.

Then there are statistics. We are going to put a sophisticated statistics framework into the Publisher that will enable both internal and external collection and evaluation of download statistics. More on this once we have made significant progress here. It’s complicated and we don’t know how good our progress will be.

Another huge target is a fancy conflict system that will change how the Publisher will deal with all kinds of errors and external failure to ensure a proper state of the system and a decent way of notifying the administrator of necessary actions. It’s basically voodoo but you will be pleasantly surprised.

Last but not least we want to extend the help system, documentation and the out-of-the-box user experience (with wizards and other magically sparkling thingies) including translating the UI to other languages than English. We feel the overall UI will have stabilized significantly soon so that it might be time to finally do this.

You might think these are worthwhile goals. We tend to agree. However, this all depends on getting our next funding round to work. More on this in the next blog post. Up to this point we want to thank everybody who has contributed financially to this project.

Credits

Our core developer Eric has been behind the new template system including all the nice API work. Eric is also in charge of the releases incorporating all the changes brought in by other developers which can be a tedious task sometimes.

Alex has done a lot of housekeeping, bug fixing and enhancing of the system, especially the nice new way of adding social media accounts and donation information, better Bitlove integration and the new feed widget.

Others have helped a lot by sending in bug reports, feature request and actual code too. It’s good to see a community grow. Thanks to everybody who cares about this project. It really helps.