Advanced plugin settings (Fusebox 1.0)

Advanced Settings

At Fusebox, we do our very best to meet the needs of every single podcaster who uses our product—a product we believe in wholeheartedly. And by that we mean, every podcaster has a different setup, from CSS to JavaScript to all the technical stuff behind the scenes.

That's what the Advanced Settings tab is all about. It's a collection of technical updates and enhancements we've made over the years to ensure that your Fusebox players experience is up-to-date and runs as smoothly for you, on your unique WordPress platform, as possible.

For most users, you will be able to leave the settings as-is; however, read on if you are experiencing any of these problems.

So, without further ado, here's a walkthrough of each of the categories listed in the Advanced Settings tab.

Clear Fusebox Cache

What This Does: Clears the Fusebox cache, but leaves any other caches you may have untouched. If you've made changes to your feed that haven't shown up, clearing the cache may help. Examples of when you might use this:

If you have recently published an episode but it has not shown up in your player, or
If you have updated a podcast file or track information in your podcast host.

Note that this only clears Fusebox player data. Your site may have a page cache or other caching systems in addition to this. This button has no effect on other caches.

RSS Show Notes Field

What This Does: Sets which part of your RSS feed is used for the show notes portion of the player (This is the text that appears below the player controls and, upon expanding, on the right in the full player.) Not all RSS feeds have all these options; look at your own feed to see which is best. When changing this option, clear your Fusebox cache afterward.

Cache Timeout

What This Does: The Fusebox cache is automatically cleared at this interval (from 5 to 60 minutes). We recommend 15 minutes. 15 minutes is a nice balance—new episodes will appear on your site quickly without causing performance problems.

Note: When you make a change to the cache timeout setting, it may take up to 60 minutes for the previously cached items to expire. If you'd like any changes to take effect immediately, click the clear Fusebox Cache.

Show Debugging Output

What This Does: Adds some extra information to the Javascript console. Useful for troubleshooting—especially (and really only) if you're technically savvy.

Track Player Data Source

What This Does: For the track player, when the artist and title are not specified in the shortcode, Fusebox can look in either your RSS feed or the ID3 tag of the MP3 file itself. This option specifies the order in which they will be used (if the data isn't present in the first location, Fusebox falls back to the second). The default setting is: RSS feed, then MP3 metadata.

Download Method

What This Does: This is a tricky one. It has to do with the download button on the players. Sometimes Automatic (which is the recommended setting), or sometimes Stream (fopen), or sometimes Local File Cache works best on some servers than others. Try it first at Automatic, and if there's anything funky going on with downloading, try one of the other two options.

Automatic (recommended): This option balances loading speed with the amount of memory required. Try this option first if you are experiencing problems downloading your podcasts.
Stream (fopen): This provides the fastest loading speed; however, larger podcast files may fail to load. This is the default method used to load all files in Versions 0.9.3 and earlier.
Local File Cache: This is the slowest, least memory-intensive method. If your podcast tracks fail to load using both methods above, try this setting.
Curl Buffer: This uses the low-level library curl to download the file. If the other settings don't work, this one should.

Use "!important" in CSS

What This Does: With this set to Yes, Fusebox players will be more assertive about overriding your theme's styles (font sizes and so forth) within the player. Usually this is a good setting to look at if there's anything that looks off in the styles of your player.

Show Color Pickers

What This Does: This only affects the settings page itself. A color picker can be found in the Player Defaults tab under Highlight Color. (On some installations of WordPress, this caused the page to break, so we have the option of turning the color pickers off.)

Here's a handy tool that can help you find the hex code for a particular color.

Javascript and CSS File Versioning

What This Does: With In filename set, our Javascript (JS) file includes a version of this: "main-2.3.5.min.js". With In query string (another option in the drop-down), the file looks like: "main.min.js?ver=2.3.5". The first option ( In filename) is best for cache busting: some caches are overzealous and will serve the old version even if the query string has changed. The second option ( In query string) is best if there are special situations on your website where you want the name of the JS file to remain constant across versions. The same logic applies to the CSS file.

Inject Assets into HTML

What This Does: This uses an alternate method for getting our JS and CSS files onto the page. We strongly recommend you stick with No (Recommended) as your option.