Open Channels FM v7.0 Release

BobWP:
Hey, BobWP here. And yes, it’s time for another release. This one’s been in the makings for quite some time, to tell you the truth. It’s. Well, let’s just say that when I did the rebrand, or we did the rebrand in June of last year, the following months, six months, we actually reworked that rebrand even more. And that leads us to today, which we officially announce version 7.0.

Now, for those new listeners that have never heard me talk about versions and all that good stuff, yes, we do versions for our release of our site. All the stuff that we’ve done during a particular time. Some are small, some are larger. And yes, we do have a change log as well. I’m not going to get into that because I’ve talked about that a lot, a lot of you have heard this already. But if you’re interested, we do have a change log on our site and we do have a few posts that talk more about why we do versions.

But this is a pretty exciting one because it really started out with the rebranding of do the Woo to Open Channels fm. And during the holiday end of December, I did release an episode that did explain a bit more about the entire transition of 2025 and how we got from do the Woo to Open Channels. So if you want to listen to that, that kind of gets into that whole flow of 12 months and what happened.

7.0 is a culmination from June to January 2026. And yeah, there’s a lot of stuff we did and a lot of it seems like I can explain it, you know, in a few words, but it actually took months. So we did change the structure from version 6.0 when we did rebrand to three channels. So we have three channels now, open Makers, Open Web Conversations and Do the Woo.

Now, speaking of do the Woo again, you can listen to the episode where we talked more about that. It is now a separate podcast on a site of its own, which you can go to dothewoo.com host KB Keith and James Kemp are continuing with that channel. And yeah, that’s a pretty big thing because that’s really where our roots were was do the Woo and now we are Open Channels fm. But it has come back to life. So do check that out.

Now, another new thing that more recently I’ve just started, that’s in this version are some blog Posts called Creator Meanderings. Again, not going to go into a lot of details, but these are posts that I’m writing and yesterday I had published a blog post about what I’ll be doing and talking about. So that is something new.

We had Nathan Wrigley, end of last year join as a new host. Now we’re doing a very unique podcast. We kind of took it from an old podcast we did, or we had a little bit of fun. You can look for the one we did in December, but there will be one coming out again soon and that will be a monthly podcast. And many of you know Nathan from WP Builds and WP Tavern.

Now those are really the kind of the new things it sounds like. That’s maybe not a lot, but it is quite a bit actually, especially the structure, which I’ll talk a little bit more about in some of the updates.

Another thing we did was a slight name change. We were basically saying Open Channels fm and I moved that to remove the dot. That’s fine for our URL, but it’s Open Channels fm. Just to not confuse it with anything out there that just says Open Channels. Because we started having people say, oh, Open Channels this, Open Channels that. I would rather focus on Open Channels fm.

We also updated the homepage to reflect this newest structure. So a lot of changes there that maybe are subtle but maybe not so subtle when I actually did them. And if you go to the homepage you’ll see a little bit of changes or you may not see much because you maybe been there recently and saw them already.

One of the things we also did was update podcast covers to reflect that new site Name Open Channels FM vs Open Channels FM and also all three channels we updated. This is something I’ve talked about a couple times before and I’m not going to dive into a lot but probably approximately 2,000 plus versions of featured images and it was a long haul. And because I made some changes two to three times during these last six months, a lot of them had to be redone again and redone again. So we finally have that down right now.

With everything in place, we reorganize the sidebar on episode pose on this. If you go into an actual post, you will see that the sidebar is a little bit more representative of what I want to share with people that visit the actual site. Before it was a little redundant showing stuff that didn’t need to be shown again.

So if you go to any episode post, you’ll see that we have made the subscriber Button top front and center. You’ll see the hosts and the guests and you’ll see the tags that we’ve restructured, a lot of those and then you’ll see our sponsors.

In this whole restructure of everything, we reorganized all content such as moving episodes that were under old shows or series and placing them strategically in one of our three channels. Our sponsor page which I just talked about and if you are interested in sponsoring you are looking for sponsors right now we have 6 month and 12 month slots that you can get there. It’s a bit of an investment but you’re going to get a lot out of it, especially over a year’s time. And the sponsorship page now better reflects the model that we’re going to be using going into 2026.

Now a few fixes. I mentioned that you’ll see the tags now that are on each episode over in the sidebar. Hey, nothing new. How many times have we seen tags in the sidebar on a WordPress side but I really took the time to reorganize the content into more meaningful tags, but you’ll see those. In fact, I list all the tags at the bottom of each page just to show you, you know, what we’re doing, what we’re talking about, and also to help you find something that maybe you are particularly interested in.

We removed all the featured images after redoing them so many times over the six months from all archive pages for cleaner discovery. Because our featured images are often a bit redundant. You know, it’s the basically the channel featured image. So we want you to see the title of the episode, what it’s about. And before you can get right into it, we also fixed our episode numbers.

Now this isn’t a huge thing that I feel like has to be in people’s faces, but it does help for people to refer to certain numbers. Oh, you know, episode number this or even helps myself. Originally when I was doing featured images, I would put a little notation of the episode number. And that was quite a bit of work actually. And if something needed to be tweaked or something, anyway, it just didn’t work.

So now you will see we’re using meta to actually put it in a couple spots on the homepage. You’ll see the latest episode that’s out has the number, the episode number as well as you will see it on each individual episode post.

For the longest time we were leaving sponsor logos and call to actions up on episodes, or I should say on posts. And we’ve decided that we have removed all past sponsors just because we really want to focus on who is supporting us now. So the benefit of actually becoming a sponsor and continuing to be a sponsor is those will stay in all the episodes and they can be easily changed out with new messages.

And of course there’s probably a ton of things I’m forgetting. I just can’t remember all the little things. I go in, little tweaks, little changes. And the biggest, probably what I would say, bug fixes. And you know, maybe it’s not a bug fix because maybe you don’t really think it’s a bug but.

But I’m trying to be on more podcasts. Moving into the new year, I stepped behind the scenes in production for quite a while. I’ve mentioned this before, but I know two of them that I’ll be doing. I’ll be doing one with Cami McNamara on Habits, you know, habits for freelancers and small businesses and stuff. And also the one I mentioned with Nathan. There might be some other opportunities where you’ll hear my voice more, who knows.

And of course we do have a few things we’re still working on. A couple things we want to dive into. We’re kind of seeing how it all works out but that will be on a smaller version update coming soon. You’ll hear all about that.

So that is version 7.0 and we’re pretty excited about 2026. We have several of our hosts that are still moving into the year with us. We may have one or two more new ones coming up here soon. I’m still working on details for that and hey, I won’t give away anything else because I guess save it for the next small update.

But yeah that’s it and hope you enjoyed this little episode. Sharing with you more about this. And again you can see our entire changelog from the very beginning on Open Channels fm forward slash changelog and check that out. So until the next time, take care and thank you for listening.