Paginated Episode Page List URL Doesn't Work with Theme Landing Page Activated

My site (https://www.gulchcast.tech) uses a theme from Cryout Creations, and utilizes a landing page for the front. When I try to view the paginated episode page list, the URL (https://www.gulchcast.tech/podcast/) simply goes right back to the landing page instead of the list. Is there an alternate URL? I need something I can put in my navigation bar so users can access the old episodes.

EDIT: A bit of additional info…the landing page also shows recent blog posts, but the Episodes do not show up on the landing page’s feed. They do show up when I disable the landing page. The URL also works when the landing page is disabled. But the landing page is an integral part of my site and can’t be taken down.

It’s very easy for themes to break WordPress logic that enables plugins to present their content, which is probably what happened here.

What I can offer you as a workaround is this: Create a new page and use the shortcode [podlove-episode-list] to display a full archive of your episodes.

Is the Episode List shortcode paginated? Our show has over 50 episodes with one being added every week. That’s going to create a ridiculously long page rather quickly if it’s not paginated.

Is there a direct link other than URL/podcast/ that will display the episodes as blog posts?

You can try to change the archive URL in “Podlove > Expert Settings > Website” but it might not work due to your theme.

/edit

I take a hideously long page any time over pagination. Even if it’s a thousand episodes, it’s much easier to scan/search in one page rather than a hundred pages (at least on an archive page like this with very few text per entry).

But to answer your question, no, the shortcode is not paginated.

Well if I can’t do that, at the very least is there a shortcode or script to embed the most recent episode in a page that will automatically update when a new episode goes up?

You can do that with Podlove Templates. Here’s an example that shows the web player for the latest episode: https://gist.github.com/eteubert/acc1ceac56bb3cdbd4c9857460a78d69

I have done a bit of hacking and found the sources of the issues, and I think you really should address them.

Inside the custom file type definitions, you have archiving set to “false.” I’m not sure why you chose to do this, but it prevents sites that use landing pages from displaying paginated archives. You need to include an option in your control panel to turn regular Wordpress archiving on if the site has issues due to using a landing page.

Secondly, the posts not displaying on the landing page was indeed due to the theme’s structure, which I was able to solve. However, when pulling the excerpt for the feed, it instead pulled the full episode summary, which was a paragraph long. You need to separate the summaries from the excerpts. Perhaps the best way to do so would be to create a new database entry for the podcast summary, separate from the excerpt, with the feed RSS for the podcasts pulling from the summary field rather than the excerpt.

Neither do I to be honest, it was probably in the way of our other archive page customizations. I will look into it and may offer a setting to turn it on.