I’m looking at this tutorial, doing some work for a client with a podcast. How to make a podcast RSS feed in Ghost
I’m not loving the idea of putting a podcast URL into the Facebook description as a workaround, (a) because I am enough of a dinosaur to use Facebook still and (b) because for Ghost-hosted podcasts, it means having to actually inspect the page source to get the URL I need.
Before I write a Netlify function to catch a Ghost post-published webhook and shove a Ghost-hosted podcast URL (determined by parsing the content… ugh) into the post code injection via the Admin API so that the RSS.hbs feed can use it, has anyone done anything similar? And is your code on GitHub or somewhere?
Or alternately, anyone want to tell me why this is a terrible idea? 
Your idea seems a reasonable hack as a next-best-thing to first class podcast support.
I’d love to have a couple bonus fields per post in the editor. Bonus points if the editor could see what the theme wants them labeled as or what format to show them in (like custom settings in package.json). That wouldn’t solve getting the values into the fields, but it’d open up a lot of interesting theme behavior that’s currently hard to get.
I’ve been involved with software projects that support completely freeform schemas and they can be kind of a mess to work with. I can see why Ghost has been slow to support completely custom data model extensions.
But you are proposing a middle ground, like “Look: gimme 10 custom fields with custom labels”. In code, that’s a good deal more easy to manage. You have 20 extra columns with names like custom_field_1_label and custom_field_1_value and maybe custom_field_1_type.
MySQL also supports a JSON data type, so custom fields could be stored as JSON as well, where a fixed schema would not be required internally.
https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/json.html
One area were WordPress totally dominates is in recipe blogging-- another custom schema use-case.
I feel mixed on how much Ghost should stay focused on the “blog with a newsletter” case vs branching out more into a CMS-land, to support other schema like podcasts and recipes.
I see part of Ghost’s value as standing in contrast to projects like WordPress and Drupal which can morph into a content management system for nearly anything. But yet, I have some recipes on my blog and there are bit awkward to management, and you’ve a customer who wants podcast support.
So this middle ground is interesting to explore-- is there a way to support some level of custom schemas without the total flexibility and complexity that WordPress has?
Meanwhile, I wrote that Netlify function. I’ve got a rewrite planned to improve security, but it works as a proof of principle. (Maybe this weekend? Gotta do the paid work first!) It feels pretty magical. Drag the MP3 into a post, add title and image with the Ghost editor, and put on a podcast tag, and the rest just happens.
It occurs to me to wonder if something similar could be used to create the missing recipe features? If a post had a clearly labeled ingredients list and recipe steps in a consistent format, it would be possible to create the schema entries…
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