Optional features

Podcaster includes three features that are useful for podcast websites but not essential. For this reason, these three features are optional. To opt-in to them, you must specify them in your Eleventy configuration file.

eleventy.config.js

export default function(eleventyConfig) {
  …
  eleventyConfig.addPlugin(Podcaster, {
    handleDrafts: true,
    handleExcerpts: true,
    handlePageTitles: true
  })
  …
}

Note

There’s a shorthand for specifying all three options at once: optionalFeatures: true.

Drafts

You mark a post as a draft by including draft: true in its front matter.

By default, drafts are omitted from builds when you run Eleventy in build mode, which is the default. They are included when you run Eleventy in serve or watch mode.

You can override this behaviour by setting the environment variable INCLUDE_DRAFTS to true or false.

Excerpts

An excerpt is a short summary of an episode post, usually the first paragraph. Excerpts are HTML, even if the post itself is Markdown.

Here’s how Podcaster calculates a post’s excerpt.

if a Markdown excerpt is explicitly specified in front matter as excerpt, then that is converted to HTML and returned
if an excerpt is explicitly specified using the delimiters  and , then that is converted to HTML, if necessary, and returned
the first paragraph not in a blockquote is returned

You can use excerpts in your templates by including them as {{ excerpt }}, or as {{ post.data.excerpt }} when you’re looping through a collection. They are particularly useful in lists of episodes with long show notes, and they can also be used to provide the Open Graph description of an episode post.

<meta property="og:description" content="{{ excerpt | strip_html | truncatewords: 50 }}">

Page titles

Podcaster can also generate page titles. These titles are designed for use in the <head> of your pages, as the content of the <title> element and possibly the <meta property="og:title"> element.

<title>{{ pageTitle }}</title>

By default, the page title is the title of the post, followed by a ·, followed by the site title. If the page title and the site title are the same, the site title is omitted.

If you want to change the delimiter from · to something else, you can specify your custom delimiter as the value of the handlePageTitles option in your Eleventy configuration file, like this:

eleventy.config.js

export default function (eleventyConfig) {
  eleventyConfig.addPlugin(Podcaster, {
    handlePageTitles: '|'
  })
}