Podlove is an open source project and is creating truly free software (under the MIT license) to be used by anybody. And in the last two years we have come a long way.

The team has grown step by step and the software has been improving steadily. The most recent release of the Podlove Publisher has delivered a ton of enhancements and we are still not running out of ideas on how to improve and solidify the system to be even more versatile.

Last year we started our first round of crowd funding to get the financial support we need to keep our core developer Eric away from boring jobs (he spent around two days a week on Podlove and wants to continue to do so this year) and to fund the infrastructure, other expenses and travel costs needed for the rest of the team.

This has worked out really great: in the last year we collected around 10.000 EUR which was more or less exactly what we needed. But now the funds are mostly used up so we'd like to ask you for your continued financial support of our project to be able to proceed with our quest and deliver even more cool stuff during 2014.

Our Agenda

Release 1.10 of the Podlove Publisher has already brought a long list of improvements and bug fixes featuring the amazing new programmable templates that will make setup and customisation of your podcast site much, much easier than before.

So what's next? It's always difficult to make promises and define roadmaps but we have a good grasp of what kind of problems we'd like to tackle. So here is what we like to do in the near future.

Top of the list is the need for viable statistics. We are planning to come up with a complete tracking framework with beautiful download statistics in the admin interface. And we also want to provide the necessary glue for detailed statistics on the server side by third-party scripts like Pentastats (or other log file consuming monsters) by associating URLs with episodes. We have thought about this a lot and we think we have an approach that can workand that you will all like.

Another top priority is the Podlove Web Player. This baby hasn't been upgraded a lot recently but we are now making good progress as we have spent a lot of time on mockups, UI scenarios, discussing timeline metadata and refactoring the code. We are planning big changes to the player to make it more flexible, more reliable, much nicer to look at and enriched with great metadata that will once more redefine how podcasts are published and consumed on the web.

We also have plans to make the overall system much easier to set up (adding some initial wizardry for first time users), make migration from other podcast installations easier (including migrating by reading a podcast feed), track internal errors and configuration mixups and to improve both the user experience and the documentation significantly. We are also planning to translate the user interface to many other languages once we feel we have stabilised the overall UI.

And that's just the work we'd like to put into the Podlove Publisher and the Podlove Web Player. There are some other ambitious experiments in preparation that we're going to talk in the future ("when it's ready") and that even address areas beyond podcasting.

Until then, thanks for your support. The podcasting community has supported us in a way an open source project can only dream of. We hope you will be pleased with our results.

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