Different artwork and description for category feed

Each feed has a unique set of settings that are separate from all other feeds on your site. You can set individual feed settings (including artwork and description) to whatever you’d like.

My point is that I cannot see where to set different artwork for the category-based feed. I just do not see those options when I look at the details.

Could you please give me a little more information.

1.) Log in to your WordPress site and click the PowerPress link in the lefthand sidebar of your dashboard
2.) Find the Advanced Options menu at the bottom of the page and check Category Podcasting and click the Save Changes button
3.) Look at the PowerPress menu in the lefthand sidebar and click the Category Podcasting link
4.) Your category podcast feeds are listed on the right, click the Edit link underneath the name of the feed you want to edit
5.) Go to the Artwork tab and copy/paste the URL(s) of your artwork files into the appropriate fields and click the Save Changes button

I’ve been trying to get this work as well, but noticed that no matter what I set for artwork and description (and other options), iTunes Connect (and other feed validators) only reported the default information for the feeds, not the specific Category Podcasting values — with the exception of the feed title.

Each Category Podcasting feed has its own set of settings. Are you altering the settings for each feed invidiually?

Yep. It doesn’t seem to matter what I put into each individual category podcast feed setting (aside from the feed title), it seems to be pulling the rest from the general feed. It’s immediately noticeable — the main feed has a logo for the entire radio station, while the category feed has logo artwork for the specific show.

Please post links to your different feeds so we can take a closer look at what’s going on.

This is the feed for a specific category. The description, copyright, description, album art and everything else should be different. (Only the title is different.)

https://chsrfm.ca/blog/cat/current-shows/spoken/hitg/feed

This is the master “podcast-only” feed.

https://chsrfm.ca/blog/feed/podcast

Go to the main Category Podcasting settings page and make sure Strict Categories is selected (and if necessary, click the Save Changes button) and see if that makes any difference.

Already selected.

Are you using any podcasting plugins other than PowerPress? If so, you should deactivate them as you can only use one podcasting plugin at a time.

One thing I’d suggest is to go to PowerPress >> Settings, Advanced Mode >> Feeds tab and check the box next to “Don’t allow other plugins to modify podcast feeds” and then click the Save Changes button.

No other podcasting plugins. There may have been others before, but they were long since deactivated and deleted.

Changed that setting; no change.

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Hello @encaf1,

The feed https://chsrfm.ca/blog/cat/current-shows/spoken/hitg/feed is a regular WordPress category feed, not a podcast only feed managed by PowerPress. there is an option in PowerPress category podcasting called “strict category podcasting”, if you check that then PowerPress will provide a podcast only feed for the category, the URL would be https://chsrfm.ca/blog/cat/current-shows/spoken/hitg/feed/podcast/ This is rather complicated in your case because you have a category called current-shows then a sub category called “spoken” then a sub sub category “hitg”. In this case you need to add podcasting to the “hitg”, if you are a sub category down the settings will not apply to the category you have. Simplifying your categories at 1 level (rather than 3 deep) will help the confusion some, but the strict category podcasting will fix it permanently.

With strict category podcasting when you edit the episode you will select the specific category, When you do this there is a 1 to 1 ratio, that episode will never appear in another category. If for some reason you want category crossing of podcast episodes, this is not an option for you, and unfortunately you may then be stuck with the situation currently as there’s no real good way to have nested categories as well as multiple strict podcast feeds.

Thanks,
Angelo

After quite a bit of chasing, I’ve found at least one code error which is leading to the problem.

In powerpress.php, the internal configuration structure powerpress_feed is empty at the wrong time. Rather than being filled in with category-related information by powerpress_load_general_feed_settings(), it appears to be filled in with general post-type podcasting information (as if the first set of conditions checking for category had failed).

It is my conjecture that the powerpress_feed structure is being filled at the wrong time, perhaps even before the page parameters are being parsed. Thus, the category ID is not available when the condition is checked. The fields are clearly available later, and can be shown to be sufficient to satisfy the category conditions. For example, when they are checked within powerpress_rss2_head(), powerpress_feed is set up for post-type, but there are correct conditions for category type when you check is_category(), cat_ID, etc.

To test this, I simply reset the powerpress_feed to null before the (usually redundant) call to powerpress_is_podcast_feed() in powerpress_rss2_head(), and voila! The feed now contains the custom information for the category, whereas before it picked up minimal information (title only) from the category.

So, it *is* a code problem, and while I haven’t entirely solved it for you (the timing here is crude), it is somewhere around the first few calls of powerpress_is_podcast_feed().

I did notice that powerpress_is_custom_podcast_feed() also populates powerpress_feed, so there may be more than one occurrence of this timing issue.