Media Realm’s Radio Websites contains a Program Guide feature, as well as an easy way to build Show Pages for each of your on-air shows. This article explains how to setup your Program Guide & Show Pages on your radio station’s Radio Website.

Most radio stations have a Program Guide. Our MetaRadio guide system in WordPress will allow the one program guide to be used across multiple sections of your site – including the Guide page, the global player, and any pages with a Guide block embedded on it.

Once you setup your guide once, it will display in lots of locations on your website.

You can create one Program Guide for your station, or if you have multiple stations you can create a guide for each station. When a listener selects each station from the Global Player, it will display the relevant guide information.

WordPress Program Guide Setup

Before you get started, ensure you are logged into WordPress Admin.

In the Dashboard menu, go to MetaRadio > Programs.

We setup programs first, and then schedule them in the Guide. One Program can air multiple times throughout the week, and even on multiple stations!

Click “Add New Program” button.

On this page, fill out the:

  • Title
  • Presenter
  • Attach an image using the “Upload Image” button
  • Click Save

Repeat this process for all your programs.

Next, we want to add these Programs to the Guide.

In the left Menu, find MetaRadio, and click the Program Guide menu item.

In the dropdowns, select your station and the day of the week and click “View Guide”.

We’re going to add each program to one day’s schedule. Select the first show from the dropdown, and enter the start and end times in 24 hours (6am is 06:00, 9am is 09:00, etc.).

Click “Add Extra Guide Row” to add more empty rows, fill out your daily schedule, and press “Save Guide”. We’ll repeat this process for every day of the week.

View your program guide

Now we can go to the homepage, browse to the Program Guide, and view our guide.

Customise the Guide Block

We can use the Block Editor to customize the layout of this guide.

The Program Guide block can be embedded on any page, and has various customisation options.

The ‘Station’ dropdown lets you select the station you want to display in this guide.

The ‘Style’ dropdown lets you select from one of three layouts:

  • Cards
  • Avatars
  • Grid

If you select the Cards or Avatars layouts, you will get a Tabbed layout for each day of the week. These come with various customisation options.

When checked, ‘Enable Grid Tab?‘ adds an additional tab to your Card or Avatar tab bar, allowing visitors to see the entire program grid.

The Advanced Settings section allows you to customise the tabs. You can disable specific days of the week and also rename the tabs. As an example, this could be used to create ‘Weekday’ and ‘Weekend’ tabs (rather than specific tabs for every day of the week).

Show Pages

Now we have our guide. We could stop here, but what if we want individual pages for some of our shows? Or maybe all of our shows? Radio Websites has the tools to help you set these up quickly.

You may want to create individual pages for your shows. These pages can contain important details relevant to each show, including:

  • Show description
  • Photos & biographies of presenters/DJs
  • On-Demand / Podcast Audio
  • Banner Ads for Show Sponsors
  • Song History
  • News / Blog Posts

Creating a Show Page

In WordPress Admin, go to MetaRadio > Programs. Next to each show you’ll see a “Create Show Page” button. Clicking this gives you a quick little setup page to create a show page with all the common features you may want.

On this page, you can toggle blocks such as Song History, Bio, Banner Ads, and On Demand Audio. To use the On Demand audio, you’ll first have to link your site to an On Demand audio provider such as Omny Studio.

Once you’ve filled out these details, click the “Create Page” button. You can now preview your page, and jump into the Block Editor to customize the layout. These pages can be customized just like any other page on the site. Watch our tutorial on the Block Editor for pointers on doing this.

We can repeat this process for each show.

If you need help with any of this, please contact our support team. We’re here to help.