Today we have released version 1.7 of the Podlove Publisher and apart from a few bug fixes and tweaks under the hood, there are two new modules in the package that you might find interesting.

App.net Integration

App.net (ADN) is a promising social network platform that seems to appeal to podcasters and podcast listeners alike and that has some potential for modern social media applications. Our module does just a few basic rather unexciting things: you can log in to you ADN account and the Publisher automatically create public posts pointing to a new episode when you release one. We have plans for more features for this plugin.

Auphonic

Auphonic is a web-based audio post-processing, metadata and encoding service that makes life for podcasters a lot easier. If you are not using it yet, you should strongly consider doing so. And that's why we are going to integrate Auphonic deeply into the podcast production process (it's still optional of course).

With this first release of the new Auphonic module (which is about to replace the now deprecated, experimental "Auphonic Production Data" plugin) we let you associate the Publisher with Auphonic by authenticating with your Auphonic user account.

You can then select recent Auphonic productions you have created and import all the metadata with one click. The system will extract the title, subtitle, summary, duration and the episode media file slug from the production. If you have configured the Publisher for manual entry of chapter information, the plugin also retrieves the chapter information from Auphonic if available.

If you have placed all those information in the media files by using Auphonic, it's now super easy to transfer exactly the same data into your episode description. This should make posting new episodes even easier, less error-prone and also much faster at the same time.

Soon we will add the option to create new productions from your episode data too. This allows to follow a workflow that is defined by collecting all data in the Podlove Publisher first and passing this on to Auphonic. Having both production creation and import at your disposal opens up various workflows that are still easy to use.

Moving on

This release won't be the last to add significant new stuff to the Publisher. We are addressing a variety of areas to improve the overall publishing experience:

• Improve visibility of contributors in feeds and the website
• A versatile conflict management system to ensure podcast integrity to make system setup and maintenance much easier and reliable
• Generating statistics
• Improved web player with better UI and embedding capability

Look out for more great news as we move along. And if you feel like you are getting something out of this project, consider a donation. It really helps.