Description in RSS

Podlove Publisher
1

Podlove puts the Episode description in the <description> field in RSS and the show description in the <itunes:summary> field. In Apple Podcast App in the episodes line up the <itunes:summary> field shows up, in Spotify the <description>. In other feeds I have seen the description shown in both fields, some idea how to fix it?

2

What would you like to have fixed in what way?

Podlove can not influence what clients like Apple Podcasts or closed platforms like Spotify will pick from the RSS feed and chose to display.

That being said, there seems to be some kind of confusion going on about what belongs into the <description>, the <itunes:summary> and the <content:encoded> portion of the RSS feed. IMO <description> is for a short plaintext description (not as short as <itunes:subtitle>). <itunes:summary> does pretty much the same thing. Longer text and HTML belong into <content:encoded>.

I think Podlove is duplicating <description> to <itunes:summary> (or the other way round). Since the <itunes:summary> tag has disappeared from Apple’s guide, it might go away in the future.

3

Sorry for the confusion. I know. My problem is: Podlove should copy from description to itunes:summary but it doesn’t. It copy’s the show description into itunes:summary. If it copy’s the episode description everything would be fine, then it doesn’t matter, iTunes and Spotify would look the same.
There must be some bug in our installation. So I asked for help. There are no errors in the log.

4

Hi, did you find a solution for that? Spotify still only shows the subtitle in the “Podcast information”. Thank you!

5

Hi again,
I have tried it this way (function in functions.php), but it does not work.

function set_channel_description_to_summary() {
    if (is_feed()) {
        $current_feed = get_query_var('feed');
        $expected_feed_slug = 'mp3'; // Ersetze 'mp3' mit deinem tatsächlichen Feed-Slug

        if ($current_feed !== $expected_feed_slug) {
            return;
        }

        // Hole das Podcast-Objekt
        if (function_exists('\Podlove\get_podcast')) {
            $podcast = \Podlove\get_podcast();
            $summary = $podcast->summary;
        } else {
            // Fallback, falls die Funktion nicht verfügbar ist
            $summary = get_bloginfo('description');
        }

        // Überprüfe, ob die Summary leer ist
        if (empty(trim($summary))) {
            $summary = 'Keine Beschreibung verfügbar.';
        }

        // Setze den <description> Tag auf die Summary
        echo '<description><![CDATA[' . esc_html($summary) . ']]></description>' . "\n";
    }
}
add_action('rss2_head', 'set_channel_description_to_summary', 20);

It ends up with this “”
Any help to extend the rss feed via a Wordpress hook would be appreciated.
Best wishes
Frank J.