WordPress development for Cuts & Crates, with a custom plugin that streams its SoundCloud podcast
A music culture podcast from someone who’s spent years DJing, raving and promoting. A custom plugin pulls every new episode in from SoundCloud and plays it in a player that actually looks the part.
The Challenge
Cuts & Crates is a podcast about music culture, hosted by someone with years of DJing, raving and promoting behind them. The client supplied the branding and the design. The brief was to build it in WordPress as a single-page site, with a privacy policy, that matched the design closely.
Most of the site was straightforward. The episodes were not. They live on SoundCloud, and the standard SoundCloud embed is a generic widget that clashed with the design. Each new episode would also have meant someone adding it to the site by hand. The client wanted episodes to appear on their own, in a player that looked like part of the site.
A custom SoundCloud plugin
I built a custom WordPress plugin that connects to the SoundCloud API and copies the account’s tracks into a Podcast post type. It brings across the title, description, artwork and running time. The sync runs on a schedule, either from WP-Cron or from a real server cron through a secured URL. It’s built to fail safely: runs never overlap, and if SoundCloud’s API returns a partial or empty response, nothing on the site gets unpublished. A settings page shows when the last sync ran, and admins get a warning if syncing stops.
The episodes appear through a Podcast Feed block, so the team can place it, add a heading and choose how many episodes to show, just like any other block. Each episode has its own custom audio player, styled to the design. SoundCloud doesn’t provide a fixed audio file for a track. It issues short-lived signed streams, so when someone presses play, the site requests a stream URL server-side and the player loads it with HLS. The API credentials never reach the browser. Stream URLs are cached and shared across listeners, which keeps the site well within SoundCloud’s daily request limits.
The Outcome
The finished site matches the client’s design, with episodes that look like they belong on the page rather than in a third-party widget. When a new episode goes up on SoundCloud, it appears on the site automatically. The team publishes in one place, and the website keeps itself up to date.
