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Outpost’s Dovetail integration connects to your PRX podcast hosting account and automatically creates a page on your site for each podcast episode. When new episodes are published in Dovetail, Outpost creates corresponding pages in Ghost with embedded audio, show notes, and metadata.

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What syncs

Sync direction is one-way: Dovetail to your Ghost site. Outpost also updates the episode URL in Dovetail to point back to the newly created page on your site.

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Setup

1

Get your PRX API credentials

You will need your Client ID, Client Secret, API URL, and Podcasts API URL from your PRX/Dovetail account.
2

Connect in Outpost

Go to Settings → Integrations → Dovetail and enter your credentials. Click Connect to authenticate with the Dovetail API.
3

Select podcasts to sync

After connecting, Outpost retrieves a list of podcasts from your Dovetail account. Select which podcasts you want to sync to your site.
4

Configure per-podcast settings

For each selected podcast, configure how episodes should appear on your site (see Configuration options below).
5

Initial sync

Outpost runs an initial sync to import episodes. Depending on your import mode, this may pull in existing episodes or only start tracking new ones going forward.

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Configuration options

Each podcast you sync has its own settings: To add the player to episodes that show a bare link or no player, set Embed Options to Embed Player, then click Full Refresh (see Checking on the import). Full Refresh rewrites the pages for episodes you’ve already imported, so read the warning under that heading first.

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Ongoing sync

After the initial setup, Outpost checks Dovetail for new episodes about every 15 minutes and creates a page for each one automatically. To update pages you’ve already imported, use Full Refresh (see Checking on the import). When a new episode page is created, site administrators receive a notification with the episode title and a link to the new page.

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Checking on the import

Below the podcast panels are three controls:
  • Check for New Episodes: click Check for New to run the regular check right away instead of waiting for the next one.
  • Full Refresh: click Full Refresh, then Refresh All Episodes to confirm. Outpost goes through up to 500 of the most recent episodes of each podcast on Dovetail, imports any it hasn’t imported yet, recreates pages that were deleted, and rewrites the pages it already imported using your current settings (see the warning below). If a regular check finds an unusually large number of episodes to import at once, Outpost pauses the automatic checks and alerts the Outpost team to look into it. Full Refresh isn’t stopped by that limit, so use it when you mean to import a large batch. While Mode is Add Only New Episodes, older episodes are skipped, even by Full Refresh.
  • Sync Status: Last checked shows how long ago Outpost last checked Dovetail, and Last successful how long ago a check last finished without an error. After three or more failed checks in a row, it also shows how many have failed. If one show can’t be checked, Outpost still checks your other shows, and the check counts as failed. A check also fails when no shows are selected.
Saving the Dovetail settings, Check for New, and the automatic check only create pages for episodes that don’t have one yet. They never change a page Outpost has already imported, so edits you make in Ghost, such as tags, the excerpt, the feature image, a transcript you added, or the page’s status, are kept. They also don’t bring back a page you deleted in Ghost.
Full Refresh is the only action that changes pages Outpost has already imported. It rebuilds each page from Dovetail using your current settings and replaces:
  • The status. Each page is set to the podcast’s Publish Mode, so a published episode goes back to draft when Publish Mode is Draft, and a page you moved back to draft is published again when it’s Publish.
  • The tags. Tags you added by hand in Ghost are removed.
  • The page body, including a transcript or notes you added by hand.
  • The title, publish date, authors, feature image, and social sharing image.
  • The meta description, when Add Dovetail Description to the is set to Metadata field or Metadata and Excerpt fields, and the excerpt, when it’s set to Metadata and Excerpt fields or Use Dovetail Summary is Yes.
  • The page’s code injection footer, and its template when Post Template is set.
Each page keeps its URL. A change you make to an episode in Dovetail after it’s imported only shows up on its page after a Full Refresh.

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FAQ

Yes. After connecting, you can select any number of podcasts from your account, each with its own configuration for tags, authors, publish mode, and more.
That depends on your Mode setting. If set to Add Only New Episodes, older episodes are ignored. If set to Import Existing Episodes, Outpost imports your existing catalog (up to 500 episodes per podcast).
Only when you click Full Refresh. The automatic check adds pages for new episodes and leaves existing pages alone, so a change you make to an episode in Dovetail, such as its title, description, image, or audio file, doesn’t appear on your site until you run a Full Refresh. Full Refresh also replaces everything else on the page with your current settings, including tags, the excerpt, a transcript you added, and the publish status, so read the warning under Checking on the import first.
Yes. When Outpost creates a page for an episode, it updates the episode’s URL in Dovetail to point to the new page on your site, so listeners can find the full page from podcast apps.
If an episode has a future release date in Dovetail, Outpost creates the page as a scheduled post in Ghost, timed to publish shortly after the episode goes live.