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Joomla 1.5
Jul
23
2008
Full Site RSS Feeds on Joomla 1.5

Joomla 1.5 RSSNo doubt about it, RSS feeds on 1.5 are better than they were on 1.0. Not perfect, but certainly better.

Instead of a single feed, the 1.5 RSS feed that appears in the browser bar is always changing because it shows only the articles on that page. You can see a good example at http://community.joomla.org.

This did lead to one problem I found the other day ... its sometimes difficult to produce a full RSS feed for all the articles on your site.

Solution #1: Publish All Articles to the Frontpage

This works well for two situations:

  1. If you already publish all articles to the frontpage.
  2. If you don't use Joomla's default frontpage. In this case you can safely promote all the articles to the frontpage because its hidden.

However, if you pick and choose your frontpage articles, you'll need another solution

Solution #2: Use Feederator

Now this is a great component! Feederator is bascially a big improvement over older RSS generators. Its free and works on both 1.0 and 1.5. You can create as many RSS feeds as you want, including a full feed for the site. The one major limitation I see is that you can't select several sections for a single RSS feed.

Also available is a premium version which costs $19 and imports RSS feeds, allowing you to place them in content items. Support at Recly.com is active and friendly. I found a small bug and Anton, the developer, fixed it in minutes.

Note: If you use #1 or #2 and want to add the RSS feed to the browser bar, you'll need to turn off the default RSS feeds by going to Menus >> Main Menu >> Parameters (Advanced) >> Show a Feed Link >> No

Further Reading

 

Comments  

 
#1 Brian Teeman 2008-07-23 15:50
Are you sure about recommending feederator? I just wen to the deo site and got nothing but errors and undefined classes.

It also requires legacy ;(
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#2 Steve Burge 2008-07-23 15:54
Legacy and broken demo site - both true, but theres no alternative for 1.5 and there is a free version to test without buying.
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#3 Kyle Ledbetter 2008-07-23 16:32
We used the Frontpage method since we don't use Frontpage component, and it works pretty good. We ran into a problem with SEF not allowing the RSS feeds to work with sh404sef and JoomSEF.
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#4 Mike Law 2008-07-23 22:28
I have been using the Feederator plug-in pretty much since it was first released as I was desperately trying to find a better way to handle RSS feeds. It was buggy at first but they offer good support and have already made quite a few improvements.

It is still not perfect but I have successfully integrated all of my feeds into Feedburner no problem. I no longer have that issue where it didn't add your domain to the front of your links in your feed, I forget the technical name for it. I know there was a hack for that but I prefer to keep hacks to a minimum to avoid having to redo them with every update.

Also on my current site I am building I have a Wordpress blog as well so I used Yahoo Pipes to combine the entire site feed generated by Feederator and my Wordpress feed. The ability to do that within Feederator would be useful, you could also combine selected categories like you mention.
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#5 Stephen Moseley 2008-07-24 19:06
Thanks for the tip Steve! This seems like something that could be pretty good (that is if the broken demo site is a fluke thing.....)

I hadn't really thought of the front page thing either. You are basically saying not using the built-in Front Page component? How do you set up the custom front page?
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#6 Johan Janssens 2008-07-24 21:41
Another solution to fix this problem would be too build a Yahoo! pipe for your site combining the different feeds into one big feed.

We have blogged a few weeks ago about how we are doing this for Nooku.org, here is the link to the post : http://blog.joomlatools.org/2008/06/leveraging-feeds-in-joomla-15.html
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#7 Cory Webb 2008-07-25 00:05
I actually need something like this for a client's site. If I build something comparable but less buggy, will you promote it on your blog for me? I promise to keep it GPL. :-)
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#8 Steve Burge 2008-07-25 10:07
Kyle ... you're one step ahead :-) Did you fix the issue?

Mike ... glad to hear I'm not alone in liking this :-)

Steve ... yes. I use ijoomla's news portal here. Others use a static content item with modules place. Others use Myblog etc.

Johan ... thanks for the tip and the link. A little confusing for beginners but might work fine for people with more experience.

Cory ... absolutely. RSS feeds need better handling in 1.5.
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#9 Anton Nikiforov 2008-07-25 17:48
Someone deleted all the feeds on a demo site. Fixed now! I guess I would need to clean up the database at least once a week :-)
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#10 siviwe 2008-07-29 01:29
1. Currently i'm designing a site using joomla, i have a form in my page but the submit button is not functioning.
2. I can not create blogs for my sent comments, i have tried several times learning from the notes but nothing is happening.
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