In most podcast themes for Ghost the audio and the RSS feed live somewhere else, and the site is just a window onto it. My goal with Pod was to use Ghost’s full functionality to well…not rely on another service.
You upload the MP3 into Ghost’s edit the same way you’d upload an image, write the show notes and publish. The RSS feed comes out of your own domain via Ghost’s routing. The audio file is nicely rendered for anyone listening through your site.
One neat thing: all configuration for an episode comes from little snippets in a post’s code injection. And we have a generator for that ready here: Episode metadata generator
Let me know what you think! (and I am also curious to see all the podcasts you publish with it!)
Being still at beginner level with how Ghost sites can be configured, I’m wondering if the Pod theme as-is can effectively support a multi-media website. Thinking of publishers who have a majority focus on blog articles, maybe embed some video clips, and would be interested in this theme supporting native provision of e.g. audio narrations of articles’ text for accessibility.
Conversely, is there an automatic way provided for recorded audio files to also generate and post episode transcripts?
(Have I missed an existing way to allow copying and pasting text between threads in Forum post replies? It feels frustrating to so far only be able to add in screenshots)
It can – but that’s not the focus on the theme. I put a lot of effort into making it an audio-podcast theme. You can embed videos, use all of Ghost’s editor cards, etc.
Audio narrations are, however, not something any theme can easily do natively. That is quite a niche feature, so, unless somebody builds a theme specifically for that (I am not aware of that), you’d have to pull that functionality in from third parties.
The theme does not do that, no, since it’s only client side. Ghost also doesn’t do that. As part of a podcasting workflow that’s usually something you do before you publish an episode.
Thanks for your notes! Yes, After Enova and Meridian, I built a Ghost theme for podcasters: meet Signal mentions using an extension to provide transcripts.
I’m not sure providing an audio narrated track of the written text published in a post is niche; many legacy print media outlets now provide links to the digital version of articles paired with an audio file of the author reading the pieces aloud. These files could be created via your theme’s podcast capability…
A theme can’t do that. Themes can’t really add extra functionality beyond what’s in Ghost and what they can do with client-side javascript. So… Jannis could ship a theme AND a 3rd party integration / cloud service that added this, but that’d be well out of scope for theme.
The podcast “capability” is just putting a bunch of tags together. No audio is processed anywhere. That is at a different stage of a podcast publishing pipeline.
Have a look at the theme’s documentation. The podcasting “capability” is all Ghost – and the theme just creates a custom RSS feed for it.
Now, could I create a 3rd party integration? Yeah. But I don’t see that helpful for this particular theme, given that narrating a post that likely (given the theme’s direction) already has an audio file attached.
