RSS feeds with Joomla

Whether it is a search engine bot or a flesh and blood human being visiting your site, they expect to see new and relevant content when they get there. Although including unique content will always be the best path to go down, there is certainly room for relevant RSS feeds to compliment and enhance your own material. RSS refers to a group of web feed formats that are published and updated frequently to various places on the web. The important thing when including an RSS feed on your site is to do your homework and find other sites that are producing content that will complement your own.

RSS is a big part of running a blog these days, and any serious blogging tool must include RSS functionality if it is going to be successful. Joomla does have inbuilt support for RSS feeds and RSS syndication, and the control and enhancement of these provisions will surely increase in the future as well. With Joomla you can include as many separate RSS feeds as you want and manage these feeds individually, by deciding which categories and positions they are to be displayed in. Joomla also includes 3rd party RSS feed modules and makes them available to users. The Joomla administrative console is where most of the magic happens, this is where you activate your site's syndication to the rest of the world while also adding and managing feeds into your own site. It is this dialogue between different websites that makes RSS such a fascinating and useful area of content management.

There are two separate ways to display an RSS feed in Joomla. With the first way you have to go to extensions and then to module manager. Once you have found the feed display module you simply enter in the URL address of the feed that you require and save the module just like you would any other. The second method to display an RSS feed is to use the News Feeds component that comes with Joomla. In administrator go to components, and then go to news feeds. Once in this component you can then manage all of your news feeds and put them in the appropriate categories. To see these feeds on your page you will need to make a component link in your menu.

While there are a number of Joomla modules which allow you to insert RSS feeds, you can also insert these feeds within your articles themselves and not within a module. There is a nice little plugin to do this called RSS feed Plugin for Joomla 1.5, no not a particularly creative title, but a very descriptive one. It is available from here:

http://kulkul.xahoihoctap.net/kho-tai-lieu.html?func=fileinfo&id=6

Inserting feeds directly into an article this way can give you a lot of control as to how you manage your content. If you get this plugin and insert this into your article: {RSS}http://feeds.feedburner.com/DartCreations-JoomlaFeed{/RSS} you will have an RSS feed all ready to go. Just remember, while RSS feeds are a great way to keep a blog fresh and relevant with good quality material, there is nothing like unique content that is only available at your site and nowhere else on the web.