Following up on our new policy to deliver new minor versions with (usually one) headline feature (along with necessary bug fixes) we are happy to announce the immediate availability of Podlove Publisher 2.6.

Please take notice that version 2.6 fixes a severe security bug in our code. So please update immediately. There are no earth-shattering changes in 2.6 that you should fear.

So what is new, you ask? Let’s see.

E-Mail Notifications

You might know this: podcasters recording with team mates and/or guests always tell everybody they will notify everybody once the new episode is available for download. But  somehow this check box is left unmarked after all the concentration went into the preparing the recording and finishing the publishing process. But why can’t this be done automatically?

Well, the time has come: if you upgrade to 2.6, you can enable the new “e-mail notifications” module.

Once enabled, you get an extra tab in your Podlove > Contributors menu called E-Mail Notifications.

Here you can specify which roles and/or groups of contributors you want to be notified by e-mail once the episode has been published and from which e-mail address this e-mail should be sent from (by selecting a contributor record). You can also specify a time delay so you can make sure the new episode has been successfully recognized by podcast directories, feed proxies and other elements in the cloud that usually delay the visibility of new episodes in podcast clients.

You can use the Podlove Templates language to craft your own e-mail content or just go with the default so you are addressing everybody properly. Please make sure you have configured a “contact e-mail address” which each contributor you expect to receive a notification.

This first release of this feature is intentionally designed very simple: there is one e-mail being sent for one configuration of people. Please let us know if this suits you or if you need this to be more flexible in the future.

Podlove Web Player 4 (Alpha)

We know everybody is waiting for our web player to advance. We too. We tried hard to deliver on that with our Player 3 prototype but eventually we found we were heading in the wrong direction and went back to the drawing board.

Publisher 2.6 is now coming with a new alpha (!) release of our upcoming release 4 of the Podlove Web Player. Please give it a try but DO NOT CONSIDER IT DONE. It is still work in progress. We made a a lot of progress already but we won’t consider it production ready until it is. But by trying it out and giving us feedback, we will get there sooner than later.

The Podlove Web Player 4 is coming in a new dress, provides player embedding (finally) and is prepared to deliver even more exciting things in the future. But for now just try it but don’t rely on it. We’ll talk much more about it when it’s ready.

Templates

You might still not care about our internal templating system but it’s pretty useful for some and for us it’s always a test for internal consistency as the template reflects our internal APIs and make things nicer for everybody.

We have put in some nice changes and enhancements in the way you can access and list podcast assets and feeds. Take a look at the detailed change log for more on this.

Other enhancements

We have updated a ton of little things here and there that make the UI more consistent and self-explanatory (we hope). Many small changes are also preparing the Publisher for more groundbreaking changes in the future that should make Publisher much easier to tame for casual podcasters and beginners.

For those who do not want to use the built-in Podlove Subscribe Button being loaded from the Podlove CDN (for organisational or other reasons) you can now tick a box so that the code gets loaded from your blog only. This also means updates to the buttons must come through updates to the Podlove Publisher. So when you use that option, make sure you update Publisher immediately when a new version comes out (which you should do anyway).

And even without updating you might have noticed already that Podlove Publisher now comes completely localized in German too. So if you have set your language to German in your WordPress backend, everything Publisher should be german now too.

Thanks

Thanks to Eric Teubert for most new stuff in the Publisher and thanks to Alexander Heimbuch and Markus Stuhr for work on the new Podlove Web Player 4. We also say welcome back to Alexander Lüken who is again contributing to the Publisher. And finally, thanks to everyone who helped with the translation to German.

We hope you love the new changes and features. Spread the word and happy podcasting.