Can new site use old podcast feed URL?

Hi, I am building a new site for our church and installed sermon speaker 3. I would like to know if I can just copy paste all the podcast info into the new site sermon speaker component from the old site along with the feed url or will this screw things up for the podcast? Also, if you recommend making the transition differently what would you recommend (such as a new feed validation)?

The feed provided by SermonSpeaker has always the form www.yoursite.com/index.php?option=com_sermonspeaker&view=feed . That's the way Joomla is calling the component and the view and there is nothing we can change here. Except a bit with SEF URLs, but that's not really recommended in this case.

Changing a feed URL is something that can be tricky. Documentation from Apple can be found here: www.apple.com/itunes/podcasts/specs.html#changing
Basically you add the iTunes redirect tag "<itunes:new-feed-url>" to the old (!) feed, which then tells the client to look at the new feed. Additionally you can create 301 redirects on a http level. In all cases this needs to be done at the old URL, not the new one. As the clients are looking at the old feed URL and don't know (yet) the new one.

SermonSpeaker has a built in redirect for old versions of the own feed, so this should work automatically if you just upgrade SermonSpeaker from an old version. It also has a "redirect" field in the settings, in case you move from the SermonSpeaker feed to another feed. But in your case SermonSpeaker can probably not help. You need to do that at the old feed.

Of course you need to validate the new feed first, before redirecting to it. Nothing worse than redirect from a working feed to a broken one

Thank you for your detailed response! You guys are incredible! If I am going to turn the dns to the new server so that the new site carries the same domain name as the old site would I still need to do a redirect because of the new IP address? Am i tracking with you? Thanks again

The IP adress doesn't matter. All that matters is the full URL. If the old one feed was also SermonSpeaker, then it will still work after you changed the DNS to the new host.

Thanks for the quick response! That was great news by the way! Less work! haha!

I have created a problem for myself. I have an old site with sermon 3.
www.metunited.org/jmvm1
my new site is
www.metunited.org/jmv2 with sermon 4.
How do I best handle the redirects. Can I put them in the itunes feeds on the old site and just leave it run for a few weeks?