
RSS feeds are very useful, and indeed, very popular. WordPress creates RSS feeds by default, which is good in 99% of times. But how to create your own, custom RSS Feed? Just read this post to find out!

RSS feeds are very useful, and indeed, very popular. WordPress creates RSS feeds by default, which is good in 99% of times. But how to create your own, custom RSS Feed? Just read this post to find out!
If you need a custom RSS feed, like for example, a feed indexing only somes categories + tags, or if you redirected all WordPress RSS feeds to Feedburner but still want to be able to get a category feed, the solution is to use a page template.
Simply paste the following code in a new file, save it under the name custom-feed.php and upload it on your theme directory.
Once done, simply write a new page in WordPress Dashboard (Don't type any text it in), and select custom-feed.php as a page template.
<?php
/*
Template Name: Custom Feed
*/
$numposts = 5;
function yoast_rss_date( $timestamp = null ) {
$timestamp = ($timestamp==null) ? time() : $timestamp;
echo date(DATE_RSS, $timestamp);
}
function yoast_rss_text_limit($string, $length, $replacer = '...') {
$string = strip_tags($string);
if(strlen($string) > $length)
return (preg_match('/^(.*)\W.*$/', substr($string, 0, $length+1), $matches) ? $matches[1] : substr($string, 0, $length)) . $replacer;
return $string;
}
$posts = query_posts('showposts='.$numposts);
$lastpost = $numposts - 1;
header("Content-Type: application/rss+xml; charset=UTF-8");
echo '<?xml version="1.0"?>';
?><rss version="2.0">
<channel>
<title>Yoast E-mail Update</title>
<link>http://yoast.com/</link>
<description>The latest blog posts from Yoast.com.</description>
<language>en-us</language>
<pubDate><?php yoast_rss_date( strtotime($ps[$lastpost]->post_date_gmt) ); ?></pubDate>
<lastBuildDate><?php yoast_rss_date( strtotime($ps[$lastpost]->post_date_gmt) ); ?></lastBuildDate>
<managingEditor>joost@yoast.com</managingEditor>
<?php foreach ($posts as $post) { ?>
<item>
<title><?php echo get_the_title($post->ID); ?></title>
<link><?php echo get_permalink($post->ID); ?></link>
<description><?php echo '<![CDATA['.yoast_rss_text_limit($post->post_content, 500).'<br/><br/>Keep on reading: <a href="'.get_permalink($post->ID).'">'.get_the_title($post->ID).'</a>'.']]>'; ?></description>
<pubDate><?php yoast_rss_date( strtotime($post->post_date_gmt) ); ?></pubDate>
<guid><?php echo get_permalink($post->ID); ?></guid>
</item>
<?php } ?>
</channel>
</rss>
Credits goes to Joost de Valk for this awesome recipe!
22 Responses
Amazing. Is needed for special cases. Thanks a lot.
Great tip. Everything is possible in this WordPress. BTW, I have never thought using templates for RSS.
Nice tips.Thanks for sharing.I’ll try it
Good job, thanks for sharing the php script.
Well done well done.. Love this!
Nice tip Joost, thanks for sharing.
Ahahahah… this is what i need.
Thanks jean for this awesome tips
how do i change this so it only get’s post in a certain category? for example if i only want to show post that are in my video category and not the whole site.
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