This section will cover the basics of podcasting with WpCast and WordPress, and the most popular integrations as PowerPress, Seriously Simple Podcasting, Libsyn, Blubrry, iTunes and Google Podcasts.

What is a podcast:

The base concept is that you need a web archive with a list of podcasts, and each one must contain an MP3 source.

IMPORTANT:

Popular plugins as SSP (Seriously Simple Podcasting) or PowerPress, can add custom post types and custom taxonomies. Please remember that with the WpCast theme you won’t be needing them, and you will simply use the post type “Post” and the provided taxonomy “QT Series” for the podcast series.

In the podcast industry, a podcast is often a term used to refer to a serie of podcasts. Each single podcast is then called “Episode”. In this optic, a Podcast, is an archive of posts.

WpCast allows you can use for your podcast (archive) many sources:

• A “Category”
• A Serie “QT Series”
• A user archive

We suggest to use as poscast archive the “QT Serie” post type, while you should use categories as additional topic classifications, that can be shared across different series.

An example: a serie can be for instance “This American Life” and an episode can have multiple categories, as for instance “Job, family, business, money”.

Then another podcast, gathered under another serie, for instance “99% Podcast”, can have similar categories, as “job, technology”, which can be shared across other series.

This allows the users to connect to the specific topics they like, disregarding the serie they belong to, and creating an horizontal linking that allows to discover other podcasts similar to the favorite ones.

Technical info about podcasting in WordPress

The main objective of a podcast is reach as many people as possible. With this in mind, you have to spread your episodes on every available channel.

The most popular ones are iTunes, Google Podcast and Spotify Podcast.

In order to list your episodes through those channels, you need a valid Podcast feed.

A feed is a specially formatted page that lists your entries.

WordPress and Wpcast are already creating the feed you can use for those channels. An example of a feed can be seen clicking “follow” on any archive, serie or category page.

This is what you will see

https://wpcast.qantumthemes.xyz/demo/qt-series/the-science-podcast/feed/

This special page is technically called an XML feed. It allows your followers to “subscribe” using their favorite softwares, and to receive a notification every time a new content will appear in that channel.

A “feed URL” is technically the only required element to list your podcast on iTunes, Google Podcast or similar.

Therefore, with the WpCast theme, you are not forced to install any extra plugin to broadcast your episodes, and you can start with the only tools provided with the theme.

To get the correct feed URL for your podcast, while using for instance a serie, you may want to click on the Follow button that is in the header of a single serie:

That URL is the one you want to use for iTunes or everything else, including personal podcast feed readers.

If you encounter any issue with your feed, please check out the Podcast Feed chapter of the manual.

Hosting your podcasts

With this theme you can host the podcasts directly in your website, using the media uploader of WordPress (more on the Podcast chapter of the manual). Anyway, you can host your files on every repository that is publically accessible, or on alternative repositories as Blubrry and Libsyn (check the next paragraph for more info).

If you have problems uploading large files, please read the Requirements section, it will guide you through possible resolutions, or you can also contact your hosting provider.

Additional podcasting plugins

This theme is compatible with the most popular podcasting plugins, which are

• Seriously Simple Podcasting, and
• PowerPress

The main difference is that SSP is easier to use but it misses some functionalities and connections with some third party providers. While PowerPress has quite more functionalities and is more flexible, but requires a couple more minutes for the setup, but you won’t call it “complex” either because is super intuitive and well documented.

Those plugins are not required for this theme, but we suggest using one of them to achieve a better control over your podcast feed. In the specific, we find Powerpress the best choice for anybody, unless you look only for simplicity.

Please check the next chapters to understand how to correctly set up those plugins for the compatibility with this theme.