When you host your podcast at Captivate, we give you a free podcast website for each show, so you can display your podcast in a beautiful and responsive design.
But we know many of our podcasters also like to use WordPress, which is why we created our awesome Captivate Sync™ plugin to help you manage your show directly from your WordPress dashboard.
What is Captivate Sync™?
Captivate Sync™ is our dedicated free plugin for self-hosted WordPress podcast websites.
So what does it do?
After a one-time install, you can use the Captivate Sync™ plugin in a variety of ways to simplify your podcasting process:
Create a dedicated podcast page where all your episodes live
Create custom posts for each individual episode
Generate shortcodes to display episode lists or grids
Publish new episodes directly from your WordPress dashboard
Edit previous episodes from your WordPress dashboard
Manage multiple shows from your WordPress dashboard
Check out our Getting Started with Captivate Sync™ guide for more details.
Can I manage all of my podcasting process from my custom WordPress website?
Captivate Sync™ has been designed to work harmoniously and synchronise your custom WordPress website with your Captivate podcast hosting dashboard.
You can create, schedule, publish and edit, all your episodes from your WordPress dashboard, and these changes will automatically update in your Captivate account.
There are some features that you will need to hop on over to your Captivate account for, including managing team members, billing changes and other account changes.
Can I change the custom page and post templates Captivate Sync™ creates?
Yes you can, and it's super easy to do so! Instead of using the page mapping option, you can create a shortcode within the Captivate Sync™ plugin and then use that to display your podcast in your preferred display.
So how do I publish an episode?
You can publish a new episode either from your Captivate dashboard, or your WordPress dashboard, and your new episode will be live on both platforms! The process in WordPress is similar to creating a new blog post, the only difference being you publish the episode from the Captivate Sync plugin. For more info, read our guide on publishing a new podcast episode with Captivate Sync.
Why is my WordPress site not updating with new episodes?
While Captivate Sync will automatically update your WordPress site with new episodes, occasionally you may need to manually reconnect the plugin to Captivate. This is super easy to do, and you can follow the steps to do that in our help article.
Won't my custom WordPress website get bloated by all the mp3 uploads for my podcast?
Nope, not with Captivate Sync! Any file you upload and publish via Sync is still hosted on your Captivate account, so there is no extra files being added to your WordPress database.
What if I want to stop using Captivate Sync™?
You can simply uninstall the Captivate Sync plugin™ from your WordPress dashboard. All of your episodes will still be published and be available on the various podcast directories and your RSS feed as normal. If you don't want to use the Captivate Sync™ plugin, but do want to display your podcast episodes on your website, we've still got you covered with our embeddable podcast web players.
Recommended Reading: Getting Started with Captivate Sync