On Joomla RSS feeds

Monday, 08 September 2008

This article is about creating RSS feeds from your Joomla content articles(syndication). Please don't confuse this with aggregating and displaying remote RSS feeds as HTML on your Joomla website.

RSS is a popular standard for retrieving content updates from websites.

A RSS feed is an formatted list of the newly added content(usually news, articles ) compiled in an XML file.

The list contains original website url, and a list of articles(article titles, urls, and introductory paragraphs are provided).

By publishing a RSS feed for your website, you allow remote RSS clients, called "readers" or "aggregators" (Desktop RSS readers, News aggregators sites and services, like Google News ) to display news bits from your sites, and periodically (and automatically) check for updates.

This makes RSS a good set-and-forget tool for "marketing" your articles on 3rd party websites and services.

By limiting the article text to a few introductory paragraphs you won't get duplicate content penalty on search engines. In addition, your articles will be linked with their title as an anchor text, giving you valuable backlinks, thus helping you to get higher SE(search engine) rankings.

A simple way to check the feed with FireFox is to click on the RSS icon found at the right end of the address bar.

Joomla 1.5+ can automatically create a feed for each menu item displaying multiple articles.

Just go to Extensions->modules->Syndication in your Joomla 1.5.x admin to configure the feeds.

" Smart Syndication Module that creates a Syndicated Feed for the page where the Module is displayed."

Joomla 1.0.x provides a RSS feed for your frontpage items.

This feeds are provided in 2 ways:

1) as a

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml"

tag in your HTML <header></header>
section. This method allows your feeds to be autodiscovered by search engine crawlers and other automated RSS readers and aggregators

2) as a RSS module of type "mod_rssfeed". This module displays links to various formats of site's feed,

Atom
RSS 0.91
RSS 1.0
RSS 2.0
OPML

We recommend method 1.

Go to "Components->Syndicate" in your Joomla administration screen to configure the RSS feed

There is a limitation in default Joomla 1.0.xx RSS feed. The system will only display articles from the frontpage. (Check the Content->Frontpage manager or preview your Joomla site to see your frontpage articles)

Sometimes the frontpage is tweaked or does not contain articles suitable for RSS syndication.

If you want your Joomla 1.0.x feed to contain all the new articles, not limiting the list to frontpage articles, you need to apply a little core hack:

Intructions below are for Joomla 1.0.x

Go to components/com_rss in your Joomla site's folder.

Open rss.php for editing

Locate the following line (line 234 in my rss.php)

 . "\n INNER JOIN #__content_frontpage AS f ON f.content_id = a.id"

, and add two forward slashes before the dot

The line should look like this:

 // . "\n INNER JOIN #__content_frontpage AS f ON f.content_id = a.id"

That's it, you now have sitewide RSS news for your Joomla site.

If you configured caching for your feeds, you must manually delete the xml files from the cache folder(located in Joomla root folder). The system will generate fresh files when your request the feed.