Hi mawcs,
Seeing as though this is the first negative review I have ever received and that you touch on a number of different issues in the plugin, I feel like it’s worth giving you a thorough response ??
It seems your main issue is to do with the supposed ‘hijacking’ of the /podcast slug here. You make it sound so nefarious! What you term ‘hijacking’ is in fact default WordPress functionality. As indicated in the plugin description, this plugin registers a new custom post type named podcast – how WordPress works is that all post types that are registered are required to have a custom URL slug in order for them to show up on the website. I could make the slug anything I like, but I think everyone would agree that /podcast is the most logical – the one thing that I can’t do is not have a slug at all.
In much earlier versions of the plugin there was an option for setting a custom slug, but after some extensive user research I found that no one was actually using that and it was actually confusing loads of people who were putting weird values in there that were breaking their sites. With that knowledge I made the (wise) decision to remove the option. To compensate, however, I included a filter that would make it really easy to set a custom slug for your own site along with a snippet so you don’t actually need to know any code in order to implement it. That snippet (along with many others) is available in the extensive and free documentation that I chose to supply to the plugin’s users.
Your follow-up point about the podcast page being “a god-awful, ugly, crappy post page that I can’t customize, change, or fix” actually has nothing to do with this plugin. As explained numerous times in the documentation as well as in this support forum, this plugin does absolutely nothing to alter the layout of your website. If the podcast post type archive looks terrible on your site then that is 100% the fault of your theme for not catering for custom post types in their archive templates. The template override that I suggested in the documentation is the way that WordPress handles that sort of thing and that mechanism is dictated by the WordPress theming engine and not this plugin.
Why aren’t there config options for this?
If I included options for all the things that each user wanted to do, then the settings page of this plugin would be a total mess and would closely resemble some of the other podcasting plugins that are available in this directory – plugins that I attempted to use myself before building this plugin.
Description says, “Multiple Shows.” But, the reality is that the whole thing is structured to have “multiple series” of the same show. Not the same thing.
I think you’re getting stuck on the terminology – ‘series’ and ‘shows’ are interchangeable in this plugin depending on how you choose to use them. The effect is exactly the same. I use the label series for the custom taxonomy because the original intention of the plugin was to allow for multiple series of the same show. Ultimately I expanded that to allows for multiple shows as well, but it didn’t make sense to add a whole new taxonomy (which would over-complicate the UI) so I opted to enhance the existing series taxonomy instead. This is a decision that I am very happy with and works very well, so don’t get hung up on the name for the series taxonomy.
Navigating the settings is an atrocious taxonomy of needless tabs that are missing all of the configuration options that I need and a slough of (what seem to be) duplicated settings for redirecting feeds.
The tabs exist so you don’t end up with one massive page of options – I think pretty much everyone would agree that a tabbed interface is better than a huge page of options. I don’t know what configuration options you need that are missing, but if you post on the support forum then we can discuss how best to include them in future releases.
By saying “a slough of (what seem to be) duplicated settings for redirecting feeds” makes it sounds so terrible and exaggerated! Really all it is, is a tab for handling the redirecting options and then those same settings duplicated in one place (the individual feed settings) to make things much easier for users to manage when editing the details of their feed(s). This is all evident in the plugin screenshots before you even download it.
All of my existing podcast posts don’t show up in the list of episodes, despite my telling the plugin that I will be creating episodes in posts.
You’ll have to be more specific about the issue here as you don’t give a lot of detail of what you’ve done and what the issue is. If you post on the support forum then I can assist you.
I’m sorry you don’t like the plugin, but I feel that your anger and vitriol is thoroughly misplaced. I hope this response goes some of the way to clarifying why the problems you listed aren’t as problematic as you suggest they are.
Remember that this plugin is 100% free along with its 100% free documentation, 100% free support and 100% free add-ons. All of this is here because I wanted to offer a free podcasting solution for WordPress that just works without having the massively complicated settings screens that are included in some of the other podcasting options in this directory. I do not (nor do I ever intend to) make money from this plugin, so if you don’t like it then feel free to use a different one that may be better suited to your needs ??
Cheers,
Hugh
