Setting up Drupal RSS Feeds

Looking to publish RSS feeds quickly and easily?

Check out RSS Content Builder. You can improve your search engine exposure by providing fresh, regularly updated content for all of your websites from one easy control panel. The RSS Content Builder features:

• One Time Installation! Build RSS feeds for all of your websites effortlessly from one easy to use control panel.
• Randomize the number of results for each feed on all of your web pages. Specify two different results values and the program will choose a random number of results each time.
• Open RSS links in a new pop up window. Also completely customize the look and behavior of your feed without HTML or CSS.
• Add as many RSS feeds as you want to one single page.
• Works with all RSS formats: 0.9x, 1.x, 2.x and Atom
• Both PHP and Javascript formats are supported.
• Keep the search engines coming back - RSS feeds help your pages get indexed more frequently.

A Simple Drupal RSS Setup

Drupal comes prebuilt with RSS feed support.  Unfortunately the same can't be said for its user friendliness.  Here at CWD we've got RSS support setup with Feedburner.  Our installation was simple and painless and lets subscribers get notified whenever new content is posted on your website.  Follow these steps to get rockin':

• Your front page Drupal RSS feed is located by default at: example.com/rss.xml
• You'll want to create an alias pointing this path to example.com/fbfeed (or something similar)
• Log into and create an account at Feedburner.com
• Under "feed details" you'll want to enter your "original URL" as: example.com/fbfeed (the alias you created above) - this is a feed address you only want to share with feedburner - don't publish this alias on your site (use /node/feed or rss.xml instead)
• Your "feed address" should be: feeds.feedburner.com/example (replace "example" with anything - for example, the name of your website). This is where your feed is stored on Feedburner. You'll be using this feed address in the .htaccess file below.
• Create redirects to your feedburner feed in your .htaccess file:
  • RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.example\.com$
    RewriteRule rss.xml http://feeds\.feedburner\.com/example [R,L]
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.example\.com$
    RewriteRule node/feed http://feeds\.feedburner\.com/example [R,L]
• Update: Now that Google has taken over Feedburner, once you've migrated your Feedburner feeds over to Google, you need to update your code to the feed address listed in your Feedburner account. To find out what it is, browse to My Feeds -> Click on your feed name -> click the "Edit Feed Details" link (at top). For this example, the feed address is http://feeds2.feedburner.com/example:
  • RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.example\.com$
    RewriteRule rss.xml http://feeds2\.feedburner\.com/example [R,L]
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.example\.com$
    RewriteRule node/feed http://feeds2\.feedburner\.com/example [R,L]

Voila :)  You've created a temporary redirect to Feedburner.  If ever you decide to stop using Feedburner, simply erase these .htaccess lines and the feed will be re-hosted on your site without loss of subscribers.   

Cleaning up your feeds using Drupal's Clean Feeds module

The only drawback to this setup is the placement of your read more links. If your site uses the Read More Tweak module, like ours does (which places the "read more" links on your teaser page in a more intuitive position - ie. right after the content), you will end up with duplicate read more links. Furthermore, your feed images may not load in the feed, because of the relative URL setup Drupal uses. To alleviate both these issues, we recommend you install and enable Drupal's Clean Feeds module to clean up your feeds.

Adding subscribers to your feed

Now you're probably thinking, great, but how do I add subscribers?  To add subscribers to your feed, you can simply place a link to example.com/node/feed or example.com/rss.xml on your website, preferably via an RSS logo such as this one:  (feel free to download and use this).  If you look in the top left sidebar you'll see that we've linked our feed using just this logo.

Signing up feed subscribers via email

You can also place an email signup box by the feed icon.  To do so, browse to the "publicize" tab in Feedburner, click on "email subscriptions" and follow the instructions.

Feed categories (taxonomies in your Drupal feed)

You'll notice that if you have your content linked to taxonomies (Drupal's version of categories/ terms), they will show up on your feed page.  Users can click on the terms to show only content within a respective category.