Question about User API, uploading from WordPress, and Podcast function

Get Help
#17

WordPress developers are generally incentivized through hourly client work or part time or full time agency or corporate work. If they are wise, then they will try and build a plugin or theme that serves a market need, so that they can find a path to residual revenue. Getting it out to market, growing usage, and then pivoting and adding a PRO version or some type of service where there’s a monthly subscription is where this has all gone. Matt Mullenweg, co-creator of WordPress (along with Mike Little) estimates the WordPress services and plugin/theme marketplace to be worth over US $1B and growing. Like any open source project, the incentive path to monetization is in becoming an expert in some aspect and then exploiting that expertise to generate income. Then splitting time between the free project and adding features or add-ons to the PRO version.

But, to your point in your first paragraph, there could certainly be a mix of support. I am actually planning my own Kickstarter campaign, so that we can build in the audio player integration with Radio Station, then get that out to market as a freemium plugin, whereas it accepts a file from shoutcast or icecast and then prints either the Show name or tracks into the player as they are added.

Once we get to that point, I think it’s a natural progression to make the integration with LibreTime and then I would, on my site and in the plugins read me and plugin page, recommend LibreTime as the primary radio station automation software for Radio Station. I am going to speaking to the developer helping me with Radio Station about all of this and get his input and feedback.

#18

Compared to WordPress, Drupal is still just experimenting with models for funding contrib development. Over the past year more and more Drupal (and a few WordPress) projects are beginning to use Open Collective as it’s is one of the first to provide fiscal sponsorship for projects and teams.

On that note, have you considered creating a collective for Radio Station? For some of the same reasons outlined in this comment/discussion, a collective may provide some additional opportunities to collaborate and sustain development across complementary projects.

More info can be found on their new site for OSS projects (https://www.oscollective.org/) and a bunch of folks are collaborating and lurking in https://slack.opencollective.com/

#19

No, I didn’t even know about this. I saw mention in these threads, but wasn’t aware I could participate and didn’t check into it given my more pressing responsibilities. So thanks for introducing me to the concept. I will dive into this now. Yes, it would be great if there could be some bridging of funds between complementary projects, for sure. I’ll take a look now.

#20

Assuming the Drupal station module (see the requirements https://groups.drupal.org/node/220739) would need similar integration, is there/could there be a player that could customized to play well with Drupal and WordPress? If so, possibly there are ways to pool resources.

FWIW There has been some previous discussion on Custom audio players

Custom audio players
#21

Referencing this here as it’s related to WordPress. @djtonyz Not sure if you are with the site builders associated with these services.

In Drupal, that would be considered a distribution. There’s not one specifically for radio/podcasters, but we’re considering building on top of this one https://www.drupal.org/project/thunder

Are there preconfigured setups/themes for radio stations and podcasters available in WordPress?

#22

Hi there I’m working with @djtonyz on the Radio Station plugin for WordPress, and just having a quick look at how we might integrate with LibreTime. I can see the show Schedule API docs at:
https://libretime.org/manual/exporting-the-schedule/
That seems straighforward enough. but I was wondering how to export the track information from within a show?
This issue seems to suggest there may be undocumented API for accessing some of that data can anyone clarify?

#23

Hi @majick777 - This discussion on Planning out an API might be a good one to read over and possibly comment on. There’s also discussion about WordPress specific integration referenced above.

#24

Were you able to set up the collective? If you had a chance to skim through recent discussions #communitymedia, you might see some additional overlap with Radio Station and WP integrations.

#25

I found a single open source HTML5 sticky footer player out there with an MIT license.

This could possibly be improved upon. All the other HTML5 players I’ve found so far are not open source and are for sale on various sites like Code Canyon or through their developers own websites. I’m thinking that this player could potentially be the basis for both WordPress and Drupal players, given that it’s open source on the MIT license and can be adapted for both with attribution if the license provides for that. I’m not an expert here so it’s just a suggestion, but one possibly worth looking into.

Custom audio players
#26

Yes, OnAir2 is a major WordPress theme set up for radio stations and podcasters to use as their base theme. However, in the world of WordPress purity, OnAir2 overreaches by integrating custom post types, which should be left to plugins and not a theme, for then you’re stuck with the theme and it’s very difficult to move. My plan is to be theme agnostic, so that anyone can use Radio Station with WordPress and any theme they desire - especially page builders like Divi, Elementor, Avada, Make, and other popular frameworks. I would much rather stick to WordPress best intentions - leaving a theme for layout and style and leaving plugins for functionality. The plugin can then have add-ons to make them compatible with different theme frameworks, but the base concept is to make sure that we build it out with “blocks” which is where WordPress is headed and not tie those blocks to a theme, but to the plugin. Once you start building your core theme product out with all this functionality embedded into it, it makes it very difficult for any radio station that is currently using WordPress and a theme they are already backed into to use Radio Station. Why should they rebuild their entire website on a new theme when they can just get plugin functionality and style that. God bless OnAir2 and what they are doing, but that’s not my model. Better to be theme agnostic than bake yourself into a theme and force people into decisions that become major pain points, when they can just install and style a plugin that adopts the parent theme’s CSS.

#27

I was not able to join the website you recommended, because there is a bug in the signup process and I couldn’t even register. I don’t know if it’s been resolved. I will have to look.

#28

I checked out the following to get a feel for what comes with OnAir2 -

So a goal is to include similar features/functionality in https://wordpress.org/plugins/radio-station/

Or would that require packaging together Radio Station with other plugins?

#29

I just tested https://opencollective.com/opensource/apply on a couple of browsers. Seemed to work.

If not, I’d def followup in the Open Collective #support channel.

Looks like there may be some cool ways to get contributor and sponsor support towards projects on Open Collective -

#30

@paddatrapper I’m feeling like some LibreTimeOSS / WordPress collaboration will be taking place in Cape Town!

#31

They recently fixed it after I reported it. So, I was able to sign up, but my project doesn’t have 100 stars yet on Github, so I’m kind of dead in the water with that process. I’m trying to marketing to my community to start the plugin on Git to get to 100.

#32

My goal is to be a plugin only and theme agnostic.A plugin is an independent piece of software that can be added to any WordPress site. Radio Station first creates a CCK of Shows (in Drupal parlance). In WordPress parlance, a Drupal CCK is a WordPress CPT - a custom post type. The plugin creates “Shows” CPT. You then add a Show and it spawns a page for the Show with the meta data about the show. See https://netmix.co/radio-station-demo for a demo display. Click on a Show in the master schedule to see the Show page. The plugin also spawns “Widgets,” which are blocks for the website’s sidebar. There’s an upcoming show / DJ, an on-air show / DJ, and a current ly playing song widget (but that is a manual process of using the second CPT, “Playlists” to start manually creating playlists.

This plugin should and can be used with any WordPress theme. We are not planning on getting into theming. A radio station already has a website with a theme and they don’t care to change their entire theme (costly, especially if it’s custom) and go with an untested theme that is new. So, we are staying away from themes and we are ONLY a plugin and will always be such.

The goal is to sync the Libretime show schedule via API with Radio Station’s master schedule and that will trigger the pages in Shows to be generated for the user, as well. So, if they connect via API to Libretime, the show schedule they added to Libretime would automatically spawn a clone of that schedule in WordPress through the plugin. We discussed last night about Playlisting and realize that many shows can come in as Podcasts or blocks and aren’t just a bunch of songs compiled to make a Playlist in Libretime. I think if someone were to use the Playlist functionality in Libretime, then if there were an API, we could generate that playlist against that Show in WordPress.

Just to encapsulate all of this - if a radio station realized they have Libretime to run the station and Radio Station plugin to connect to Libretime and pull data automatically via API and publish it into WordPress for them, they’ve managed to win half the battle. The only issue would be that you’d have to make the distinct choice to use Libretime first and then connect to the plugin and that will push the setup process. So, on our side, we’d need to add a setup process if using Libretime.

If the user already has shows on the master calendar and then tries to connect with LibreTime, it may double up or impact the current show set in some way. We’d have to tell the user their calendar may have duplicates if they chose to set up schedules in both.

1 Like
Planning out an API
OnAir Wordpress Plugin
#33

I’m assuming github isn’t the primary repo for WordPress plugins? Similar thing for Drupal, so we’ve been advised to sign up as ‘other’ to get around that constraint.

If you’ve already signed up, you could probably just follow-up in #support and ask to get it approved manually.

#34

@djtonyz Have you been able to get your collective approved? With your plugin on GitHub, a collective + participating in Hacktoberfest should be a great way to increase contributions to the project.

#35

@paddatrapper Does the new API now provide what @djtonyz is describing?

#36

Yes - the new API effective presents the DB to external users, so any changes to the DB can be read or made. There will eventually be some more easy to use methods, but you can do it at a low level currently with the new API

1 Like