Pinecast WordPress Sync v1.1.0
We’re excited to announce version 1.1.0 of the Pinecast WordPress Sync plugin for WordPress. This release brings a number of features which have been a long time in the making.
Changes
Section titled “Changes”Improved syncing
Section titled “Improved syncing”We’ve rewritten the algorithm used by our plugin to sync episodes. Notably, we’ve made changes to the way episode artwork is synced with WordPress.
When making unique episode artwork the featured image for posts, each artwork file needs to be downloaded to WordPress’s media library. This means transferring a copy of each image to the server that WordPress is being hosted on. For shows with many episodes, large artwork files, or both, this can take longer than most web servers will allow code to run for, resulting in a timeout.
In previous versions of our plugin, this meant that shows would sync episodes up to the point where the timeout occurred, and pick up where it left off on the next sync attempt (usually about an hour later). For many shows, this is fine. But for large networks of podcasts, this poses a problem: feeds with hundreds of episodes take days or longer to perform their initial sync.
We’ve made three key improvements:
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The new sync algorithm is two-phases. The first phase creates new episodes and updates existing episodes with metadata. The second phase backfills any new or updated artwork for each episode. By prioritizing episode updates in the first phase, all of the content is guaranteed to appear quickly: timeouts related to artwork now only causes artwork to be delayed.
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We’ll now also crop artwork to maximum dimensions of 1280x1280px. For shows with extremely large artwork (thousands of pixels in either direction), this reduces the amount of storage space used on web servers and dramatically cuts down on sync times.
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The sync algorithm also now stops syncing artwork early when the process takes longer than 25 seconds, exiting gracefully at a safe stopping point. This avoids duplicate and corrupt image files appearing in the Media tab when an artwork file is halfway-processed. This means that some shows with many large images will take multiple sync attempts to fully download, but this will backfill automatically fairly quickly.
For most shows, these changes will have little to no visible effect, but large shows should see a dramatic performance improvement and more reliable syncing behavior—especially when a new show is added and synced for the first time.
Accessibility improvements
Section titled “Accessibility improvements”We’ve heard from some of our users that the plugin wasn’t meeting our quality bar for accessibility. We take great pride in making sure that folks who rely on screen readers can use our software productively: the new version of the plugin fixes many of the rough edges that have caused frustration or confusion.
As always, if you encounter trouble or unusual UIs, please let us know so that we can audit and address those problems!
UI improvements
Section titled “UI improvements”We’ve fixed some cosmetic rough edges, and improved the wording on many of the plugin settings. We hope this makes it easier to find your way around and understand the options we provide.
Upgrade instructions
Section titled “Upgrade instructions”If you’re a WordPress user, look for the 1.1.0 upgrade on the Plugins tab of your WordPress admin dashboard. If you’ve installed the plugin manually, you can download the latest version from the WordPress directory: