Content Marketing

WordPress Sidebar Widget and Shortcode for Playing Podcasts

If you’ve ever utilized the default RSS widget for WordPress and entered a Podcast RSS feed, you’ll notice that it only displays the title and description. That’s because the iTunes standard for podcast feeds adds additional tags for the image associated with a podcast as well as the location of the podcast file itself.

Despite WordPress having its own audio player, the two don’t work together… until now! I was pretty frustrated that I couldn’t have folks play the latest podcasts from my sidebar so I built and submitted a WordPress Plugin to do this. The folks at WordPress approved the plugin, it was published in the repository, and now runs on over 200 WordPress sites.

Download the WordPress Podcast Feed Player Widget and Shortcode Plugin

Of course, you can also just search for the plugin via your Plugins page and install it from there.

Podcast Feed Sidebar Widget

It’s a dead simple plugin that enables you to enter a Title for the sidebar section, enter your Podcast Feed, set the limit on how many podcasts you wish to display, as well as set the size of the image from the podcast (a size of 0 will hide the image). The WordPress default audio player is applied using their API function, wp_audio_shortcode.

Additionally, the widget will publish the feed icon. You can also optionally add your iTunes, Google Play, and Soundcloud icons for visitors to click on. You can see it in action on our sidebar!

Podcast Feed Widget

Podcast Feed Shortcode

Quite a few users got in touch and asked if I could also add a shortcode so that they could embed a Podcast Feed with the WordPress Audio Player directly in a page or post, so I’ve updated the plugin!

Shortcode Usage:

[podcastfeed feedurl="" quantity="" imgsize="" imgclass="" itunes="" google="" soundcloud="" icons=""]Here are our latest podcasts.[/podcastfeed]

Elements:

  • feedurl – Your podcast feed address.
  • quantity – The quantity of podcasts you wish to display.
  • imgsize – The size of the image you’d like to display, 0 for no image.
  • imgclass – The class for the image, default is alignleft
  • itunes – Your iTunes address to display in the icons.
  • google – Your Google Play address you’d like to display in the icons.
  • soundcloud – Your SoundCloud address you’d like to display in the icons.
  • icons – Whether you want to display icons, default is true.

Please give the plugin a test run and a great review if you like it!

Douglas Karr

Douglas Karr is CMO of OpenINSIGHTS and the founder of the Martech Zone. Douglas has helped dozens of successful MarTech startups, has assisted in the due diligence of over $5 bil in Martech acquisitions and investments, and continues to assist companies in implementing and automating their sales and marketing strategies. Douglas is an internationally recognized digital transformation and MarTech expert and speaker. Douglas is also a published author of a Dummie's guide and a business leadership book.

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