FIR Podcast Network

Project Description

The FIR Podcast Network started out as a single podcast: “For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report.” But by 2014 numerous other shows had joined the network, and the original Expression Engine site wasn’t cutting it. For one thing, it wasn’t mobile responsive, and the announcement of Mobilegeddon made that an increasingly serious problem. For another, the original Flash audio player didn’t work on iOS devices. For a third, the site looked dated and bloglike, and the network’s founders envisioned something more like Revision3. (Okay, Revision3 is a video network and the FIR podcasts are all audio, but details, details.) What’s more, the site owners had to spend a lot of extra time manually adding subscribe and download links to each post.

The original vision for the new podcast network involved WordPress Multisite, importing all of the content from the Expression Engine site (about a thousand posts), and various other somewhat grandiose ideas that were not feasible for a pro-bono project. (I have been listening to FIR since 2005 and can occasionally be suckered into doing projects for friends. Occasionally.)

So we decided that instead of having each podcast in the network be its own sub-site, we would make each podcast a category and restrict the podcast hosts to adding and editing posts in that category. (For that I ended up using the Restrict Author Posting plugin and giving the show hosts editor accounts.)

Though the basic layout of the News Pro theme suited the client well, a number of custom templates were required, including a category grid page for the shows and a customized archive page for the show hosts, as well as an episodes page to list all the episodes and a blog page to show blog posts.

The most important function of a podcast network site is of course managing podcast files and creating feeds. For that we used the category casting function of Blubrry PowerPress. The site also has a subscribe page that uses the subscribe shortcode, and we have a playlist of the most recent 10 episodes on the home page.

I also added a “Just Released” section to the home page that displays the album art for the six latest episodes in two rows, with title displayed on hover.

Perhaps oddly, the custom page templates were not as difficult as the sticky menu, which still doesn’t work quite the way I like. I’ve worked with a handful of sticky menus since I built the FIR site and may switch over to the plugin I’m using on this site.

Screenshots

The site background, incidentally, is done with CSS, to match the horizontal stripes on the album art (designed by Effective Edge Communications.)