Episode Description Different on iTunes vs. Spotify
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PowerPress version: 8.3.5
Wordpress version: 5.5
Feed: https://www.mindfog.com/feed/podcast/I hadn’t posted anything in almost two years. This was an issue about five years ago and then you fixed it or had a workaround in another version. The answer is on the old forum and I don’t know how to search for the answer.
The issue is when posting a new episode, the Episode description appears correct in iTunes, but not in Spotify or through RSS. I use the Apple optimizations for Summary and Subtitle (they are both brief descriptions). If I recall correctly, the workaround for the RSS and Spotify feed using the post content for a description was to use the Apple optimization for Subtitle. At some point that must have changed again. If you look at an earlier episode (#25 or #24), you’ll see the difference.
I need to have the Spotify feed, for example, use a similar Summary and Subtitle, but instead it grabs the post.
Thanks for any help. I have tried checking and unchecking the “don’t allow other plugins to overwrite,” option, and then purged cache. It didn’t make a difference other than the description actually taking even more of the text instead of cutting it off.
Thanks.
The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]
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Thanks for the answer, Mike. I understand what you are saying, but that is not how the behavior was before. Something has changed. If you notice my earlier episodes, they do *not* have the full blog post in the <description> for Spotify.
There has to have been a way previously to override <description> being pulled from the blog post itself.
Is there a place in PowerPress to manually enter what gets put into the RSS for the <description> field for a post when posting a podcast?
UPDATE: It looks like from this page there is a Google Play Description Field: https://create.blubrry.com/resources/powerpress/powerpress-settings/basic-settings/
I think once I was able to add that Google Play description, each post used it for <description>. I can’t seem to find that setting though. Can you assist?
Thanks.
I figured out what it was (in case anyone else wants to do the same thing). Took a lot of digging.
I looked in the database files for my podcast and saw that the older entries had an “excerpt” field populated, while the new post had a blank field. Apparently, PowerPress will pull the <description> content for the post from the excerpt field if it is not empty. If it’s empty, it will pull the entire blog post (or summary, if that is selected in WordPress settings).
The Classic Editor doesn’t seem to show the excerpt field in each Post composition screen, or perhaps a theme update no longer showed it in the classic editor.
As soon as I enabled the Gutenberg editor and revealed the excerpt box, I put the same excerpt as I use for <itunes:subtitle> and <itunes:summary> into that excerpt box and now all my feeds are showing the excerpt I want to use in the <description> field for podcasts that use that field for the summary.
Do you know which editor you are using? (Block or classic)
In both, there is a way to enable a “Excerpt” box in the post editor. When you have that enabled, there will be a box called “Excerpt” that you can put what you want in the description tag of the feed.
Let me know what editor you are using and I can get you more specific instructions.
-Mike
Hi Mike,
I did look in the classic editor because I saw others had the excerpt option. For me, it’s not there in WordPress 5.5. The only things I have under “Screen Options” are Author, Categories, Tags, Comments, and Date, followed by a Pagination option and View Mode (Compact or Extended – Extended did not reveal an excerpt option).
EDIT: Looks like it’s theme-related. I found an article that suggested adding this line to my theme’s functions.php, so I did that and it’s good now!
// Adding excerpt for page
add_post_type_support( ‘page’, ‘excerpt’ );All good. Thank you for the suggestions!
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