ENHANCEMENT: Content filtering function

This is an enhancement request based on what I’ve read in your documentation for this plugin. I’ve used a previous version of this plugin (back when it was Amazon Polly), but stopped using it back then and haven’t had any experience with it since then. All of the new features are pulling me back.

I’m wondering if it would be possible for you to give plugin users a programmatic method by which to submit a customized version of the post/page content to the plugin prior to the audio-conversion process.

Right now, there are a limited number of means by which to add content to the post/page content before the audio-conversion process. We can choose to add the post/page title to the beginning of the post, ignore tags within the post, etc. Although helpful, it doesn’t allow for very much configurability or for audio-specific configurability.

When creating a podcast, for example, I’d like to be able to add a “Welcome to blah, blah blah…” message to the beginning of the podcast and a “Thanks for listening blah, blah, blah…” message to the end of the podcast, but I definitely don’t want to have that content in the written version on my blog. Also, there’s additional information that I associate with my blog post content that I’d like to be able to repurpose prior to having it converted to audio so that the presentation of that information makes more sense. Information that is visually presented in a table, for instance, wouldn’t make sense when translated to audio. For most content that could be easily understood, we could use some of the filters that WordPress has available for doing just that, but my use case wouldn’t work.

What I’m thinking would be helpful is a function with a specific name, determined by you guys, that I could put inside my theme (probably within functions.php) to do all of the fancy filtering/customization to the post content I want prior to the plugin using it for audio translation. Also, some kind of verification/announcement on the plugin configuration page that says “Defining a filter function “filter_content_before_conversion” within your theme will allow you to pre-filter post content before audio translation” or “Post content is currently being filtered through the “filter_content_before_conversion” function defined in your theme” would be able to relay the necessary information to the plugin user.

Then, instead of the plugin grabbing the_content from the post, the plugin would use whatever the custom function filter_content_before_conversion() returns as an input for audio translation.

I know this doesn’t necessarily help those that don’t have programming experience do fancy filtering/adding to their audio files, but it would allow all of those that do have that experience to use it to their benefit. And the minimal post/page content customizations that you have available for the others would still be available.

Anyhow, like I said, this is a hopeful request for an enhancement, and not anything that’s broken. Thanks for your work on this plugin. Looks like you guys have done a lot of good stuff since I first came across it.

Cheers.