Our Web Player has been a major breakthrough when it first surfaced in 2012 featuring a new approach to presenting podcasts on the web with the introduction of clickable chapter marks.

The initial work of Gerrit van Aaken was then quickly continued by Simon Waldherr in 2013 which brought the widget to a new level with a revamped UI adding more audio navigation and metadata features. Apart from some minor tweaks and fixes, Podlove Web Player 2 has been mostly unchanged ever since.

Behind the scenes we started thinking about and working on version 3 of the player trying to incorporate new ideas and a fresh UI. A beta version of this player sneaked in to release 2.3.4 of the Podlove Publisher but was never finalised. After some time, we found development is stuck in a dead end and so we have stopped development in favour of a new plan for a version 4 of the widget. This will take some time however.

In order to keep up with the ever evolving Web, we have decided to take care of the old code base for the time being and have updated the Podlove Web Player to version 2.1. Not much is changed however: we have updated the look on mobile devices to make better use of screen estate and have fixed some problems with outdated JavaScript libraries.

Version 2.1 is available now in the standalone Podlove Web Player plugin for WordPress and will be included in the upcoming 2.4 release of the Podlove Publisher. Developers using the button in their code base might want to update via GitHub.

Depending on how the new project comes along we might or might not add additional tweaks to Web Player 2 but don't hold your breath for major enhancements as the dog is too old to teach it new tricks.