Getting to Know Benecaster — Tours

Benecaster includes a built-in tour system that walks you through different parts of the admin. Tours are short, focused walkthroughs — each step highlights a specific element on screen and explains what it does.

Launching a Tour

Tours are available from two places:

• Setup wizard all-done screen — after completing the setup wizard, click Take a quick tour to launch the built-in Benecaster Overview tour. The button relabels to Revisit the tour on future visits.
• Tours catalog — a Tours link in the Benecaster admin footer opens the full catalog of available tours. Click Launch next to any tour to start it from the beginning.

The Tour Catalog

The tour catalog lists every guided tour available in Benecaster, including tours added by installed add-ons.

Each row in the catalog shows:

Completing a tour records your completion date. Re-running a tour replays it from step one, and finishing it again updates that date.

During a Tour

Each step highlights a specific element in the admin — a card, button, section, or panel. A tooltip appears with a short explanation. Use the Next and Back buttons to move between steps, or click the × in the corner of the tooltip to exit at any time.

Each step opens the screen it belongs to before it appears, so a tour can move you from the dashboard to the episodes screen without you navigating yourself.

How Long the Benecaster Overview Tour Is

The Benecaster Overview tour fits itself to your site, so it is not the same length everywhere. These steps always run: your dashboard stats, the public feed URL listeners subscribe to, the episode list, an episode’s audio URL, its availability controls, and the subscriber list.

The rest run only when there is something on screen for them to point at:

• Subscribers by tier — when at least two of your tiers have subscribers, which is when that dashboard panel appears.
• The three Memberships steps — when a show uses Benecaster’s built-in membership and has at least one active tier. You don’t need to have connected Stripe yet.
• The test-mode bar — when any show on the site is in test mode, so the bar is showing.

A step that doesn’t apply is left out entirely rather than shown greyed out, and the step counter counts only the steps you will see. Built-in Tour: Benecaster Overview lists every step.

When a Tour Is Updated

If you completed a tour and it is later updated, a blue bar appears at the top of the next Benecaster screen you open: “The {tour name} tour has been updated since you last took it.”

• Take the tour starts it on the screen you’re on. If you stop part-way, nothing is recorded and the bar comes back on the next page load.
• No thanks hides the bar until that tour is updated again.

You’re only offered tours you’ve already completed, so a new site never sees this bar. Each person who uses the admin answers for themselves. If more than one tour has been updated, each gets its own bar, and an add-on’s tour being updated never brings back the Benecaster Overview tour.

A site can switch these offers off entirely. There’s no setting for it on screen; a developer can do it with the benecaster_tour_reprompt_enabled filter, described in Stop Benecaster offering updated tours again.

Tours from Add-ons

Add-ons can register their own tours. An add-on tour appears in the catalog alongside the Benecaster tours once the add-on is installed and activated. This means the catalog grows as you add functionality — check back after installing a new add-on to see if it includes a tour.

Migration Wizard Tour. The Migration Wizard adds a two-step tour. The first step points at the Migration tab in the show’s settings, where the wizard lives. The second depends on whether that show has migrated yet: on a show that has not, it explains the wizard’s backup step and what the backup covers — your Benecaster data, not your whole site; on a show that has, it walks you through the migration dashboard. The tour appears in the catalog once the Migration Wizard is switched on for at least one of your shows. If it is on for more than one, the tour opens on one of them.