Podcaster

Hosting a podcast and creating its website with Eleventy.

  1. Documentation
  2. Optional features

Optional features

Podcaster includes some optional features which you might find useful for your podcasting website. These features are turned off by default, in case you want to implement them some other way. You can enable some or all of them when you include the plugin in your eleventy configuration file, like this:

// eleventy.config.js

import Podcaster from 'eleventy-plugin-podcaster'

export default function (eleventyConfig) {
  .
  .
  eleventyConfig.addPlugin(Podcaster, {
    handleDrafts: true,
    handleExcerpts: true,
    readableDateLocale: 'en-GB',
    calculatePageTitle: true
  })
  .
  .
}

Drafts

If handleDrafts is set to true, the plugin will allow you to designate posts as drafts by including draft: true in their front matter (or elsewhere in the data cascade). By default, drafts will be included in the build when Eleventy is running in serve or watch mode, but will be excluded in build mode. You can override this default behaviour by setting the INCLUDE_DRAFTS environment variable to true or false.

Excerpts

If handleExcerpts is set to true, the plugin will create excerpts for your podcast episode posts. Excerpts are shortened versions of your final content, which you can use on index pages or topic pages or guest pages instead of your complete post.

Excerpts are available in a template as {{ excerpt }}, but you will probably access them from a collection item, where they are available as {{ item.data.excerpt }}. Excerpts are HTML fragments.

Podcaster defines the excerpt in one of three ways, in order of priority.

  1. As an excerpt field in the post’s front matter. This should be written in Markdown.
  2. The part of the post between the excerpt delimiters <!---excerpt--> and <!---endexcerpt--> .
  3. The first paragraph in the post which is not nested inside another tag. (This is so that a blockquote at the beginning of a post isn’t included in the excerpt.)

readableDate filter

Podcaster optionally provides a readableDate filter, to match readableDuration and readableSize. It transforms a date into a localised string, which usually includes weekday, day of month, month and year.

To make Podcaster provide this filter, pass a locale string as one of the options when you’re adding the plugin to your config file. In English, the two most common locale strings are 'en-GB' and 'en-US'.

pageTitle attribute

Podcaster also supplies a pageTitle attribute, which will consist of the title of the page, a separator, and the title of the site. It can be used in the <title> tag in the <head> of a page, and it might also be useful in a page’s Open Graph data. Like this:

<head>
  .
  .
  <title>Optional features &amp;middot; Podcaster</title>
  .
  <meta property="og:title" content="Optional features &amp;middot; Podcaster">
  .
  .
</head>

For the site title, Podcaster uses site.title from the data cascade; if that’s missing, it uses podcast.title. The default separator is &middot;; you can specify your own separator when you add Podcaster to your config file like this.


// eleventy.config.js

import Podcaster from 'eleventy-plugin-podcaster'

export default function (eleventyConfig) {
  .
  .
  eleventyConfig.addPlugin(Podcaster, {
    calculatePageTitle: '|'  // specifies the pipe character as a separator
  })
  .
  .
}

Note

These features aren’t specific to the task of creating a podcast website, and so it’s completely safe to ignore them. However, I use each of them in some or all of my podcasting websites, so I’ve decided to include them.