Simple Bulk Episodes provides a simple way to add a bulk of episodes for use by the Seriously Simple Podcasting plugin.
Seriously Simple Podcasting (SSP) is an awesome podcasting plugin that provides everything you’d need to publish a podcast. I’ve been using it extensively and it is truly simple and very straight-forward to use.
What problem does this plugin address?
The only issue I had was that adding multiple podcast episodes at a time is a time-consuming and laborsome process. This isn’t really an issue with SSP as it uses the standard WordPress admin. This also may not be an issue for most podcasters as they probably record and publish no more than one episode per day at a time. As for myself, I upload and publish/schedule a months’ worth of daily episodes at a time. The actual process for me to add episodes with SSP is:
- click add new episode from within the WordPress admin
- Wait for the add episode page to load
- Copy episode title from spreadsheet
- Paste it to WordPress
- Open a Word/text document with the post content of the episode
- Copy content from the document
- Paste it to WordPress
- Copy URL of MP3 file
- Paste it to WordPress
- Enter length of episode (my episodes are uploaded outside the WP install and thus SSP is unable to auto-detect this)
- Edit the publish date-time to a specified date using the admin UI
- Schedule (publish in the future) the episode
- Wait for the page to process your episode and reload
- Repeat everything above for every episode needed for the month (20-22 times for a weekday only podcast)
Simple Bulk Episodes aims to speed up that process!
It’s as simple as entering all your relevant podcast episode information to a spreadsheet, copying the info and pasting it into the plugin’s Bulk Episodes page in the WordPress Admin.
For my process, I already receive a spreadsheet with the month’s worth of episodes that includes episode info such as the title, publish date, and MP3 Url. I need to add the episode length and copy / paste episode text content (html formatted, in one line – no spaces). Once all the podcast episode information is ready on the spreadsheet, adding all the episodes thru the plugin’s admin page is simple. Click here to download a sample CSV.
1. Copy all data from the spreadsheet and paste it to the plugins text field. Click on Continue
2. The next screen that loads is the verification screen. If all the data is displayed properly, click on Verify and Submit near the page bottom to submit the data and add all episodes to WordPress/Seriously Simple Podcasting. If data isn’t correct, click on start over near the top so you can repaste your spreadsheet data – this essentially takes you back to step 1.
3. If everything was good to go on step 2 and you clicked on Verify and Submit on step 2, you are taken to the confirmation screen. Done!! This screen gives you a listing of all the episodes added as well the links to edit and view each one of them.
How to get it
You can install the plugin thru the WordPress admin by going to Plugins -> Add New and searching for Simple Bulk Episodes or download it at the WordPress.org repository here: Simple Bulk Episodes.
You can contribute to or fork the plugin thru its project page on GitHub: Simple Bulk Episodes.
