As Megaphone is primarily a podcast WordPress theme, this part of the documentation describes how the website content should be organized to perfectly align with the theme logic and most of its features.
The terminology
First, here is a quick tip for a better understanding of the theme terminology used in the Theme Options Panel and other places across the website.
- The episode represents a regular WordPress post which is supposed to be playable, therefore, it should contain an audio source inside its content.
- The show is a regular WordPress category which represents a group of Episodes. If your audio posts are organized by categories, these categories are called “Shows”.
Separating episodes from blog posts
Megaphone theme assumes that all your posts are episodes (having audio) by default, as most of the podcast websites don’t have regular blog articles. However, if your website has both audio posts and textual-only blog posts there is an option to separate these two. Go to Appearance -> Customize -> Theme Options -> Podcast -> General and specify one or multiple categories you are using for regular blog posts.
So, wherever you want to display Episodes (i.e. on the Front Page), the theme will only pull posts from categories that are NOT specified as the blog categories. This way you make sure that you get episodes and blog posts separated and displayed accordingly.
In the same way, this option automatically ensures that categories that represent “Shows” will list episodes, not blog posts.
If you are using episodes (audio posts) only, you want to keep this option empty and all posts will be considered as episodes.
See it in action in this short video:
Using popular podcasting WordPress plugins
Since, version 1.1, the Megaphone theme introduced an option to switch the default theme logic for separating regular blog posts from episodes if you are using one of the popular plugins for podcasters, such as Podlove and Seriously Simple Podcasting. See the image below:
Basically, you just need to select the option for a plugin you are using and the theme will understand how episodes and posts should be organized and separated automatically.
Theme options
Inside the theme options, episodes and regular posts are also divided into two separate sections called “Podcast” and “Blog”, as shown in the image below. The Podcast tab is used to manage the appearance and functionality of your episodes and shows, while the Blog tab is reserved for your regular posts and general WordPress archives like tag listing, search results page, etc…
