What’s new in version 2

Thursday, 8 January 2026

Version 1.0.0 of Podcaster was released on 8 January 2025. Today, a year later, I’m happy to announce the release of Version 2.0.0.

New documentation

Perhaps the most important change in Version 2.0.0 is a new set of documentation. It’s simpler, I think, and more comprehensive. And there’s room to add new material when it’s needed.

And to support this new documentation, I’ve made some changes to how Podcaster works — changes that should make it easier to use, to understand, and to explain.

New features

Here are Podcaster’s most important new features:

• The structure of a Podcaster project has been clarified. Your episode audio files go in the episode-files directory, and your episode post templates go in the episode-posts directory. The episode posts are available to your templates in collections.episodePost.
• You don’t need to specify as much episode metadata in your episode posts’ front matter:
  • You can specify episode.seasonNumber, episode.episodeNumber and date in your episode post’s filename.
  • Podcaster can work out episode.size, episode.duration and episode.filename from the files in your episode-files directory or from the files in an S3-compatible bucket.
• The options accepted by Podcaster when you add it to your Eleventy configuration have been simplified.

And here are some of the other changes:

• .m4a episode files are explicitly supported.
• The durations of episode files are calculated more quickly, using music-metadata instead of mp3-duration.
• The three readable filters, readableDate, readableSize and readableDuration, have been given more sensible defaults and some useful options.
• episode.duration can be supplied in h:mm:ss format instead of as a number of seconds.
• Podcast chapters are supported.
• Episode post permalinks can be customised.
• Podcaster now respects quiet mode.

As always, if you have any questions or suggestions or if you encounter any problems, please contact me on Bluesky or on Mastodon, or on the Podcaster GitHub page.

Upgrading from Version 1 to Version 2

Version 2 breaks compatibility with Version 1. Here’s how to get your Version 1 project working on Version 2.

1. Put your episode audio files in an episode-files directory in your project’s input directory. Don’t forget to add that directory to .gitignore.
2. Put your episode post files in an episode-posts directory in your project’s input directory. If you have a directory data file for those posts, move that as well, and rename it to episode-posts plus the appropriate extension.
3. Update the options passed to addPlugin in your configuration file. Here’s a description of the new options.

You might also want to rename references to collections.podcastEpisode to collections.episodePost, although the original name is still supported.

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