After I upgraded this site to Joomla 1.7 I wondering, how I can create a RSS feed with all entries to re-create the original functionality we had in the initial site. The problem is that Joomla 1.7 use for this purpose the "Syndication Feeds" module, which picks up the Featured Articles menu item (if any) to create a RSS feed from the currently displayed page.... This works fine - relatively - if you use the default Joomla setup, the Featured Articles menu item being your default homepage. But this isn't my case - and this isn't anymore the case of most of the sites... so I needed to find out something else.
After finding out that don't really have any alternatives - at least not freely available ones - I decided that I will need to cook up something with what we have already in place.
And that I was done for this site - and as you can see, works! To get around the limitations of current setup, you need to do some simple steps:
- You need to create a Featured Articles type of menu item, somewhere in an obscure menu (I created a Hidden Menu, and published it in a module position not existing in this template )with these settings:
Category Selected: All Categories, #Leading Articles: set to the number of articles you want to show on feed, #Intro Articles: set to zero, #Columns: set to 1, #Links: set to 0, Category order: No Order, Article Order: Most recent first.
The rest of the settings are optional, you can play with them... - Set ALL articles you want to be included in the feed as Featured
- Publish the "Syndication Feeds" module in a position of your choice
Now when you click your new RSS menu link it will show all your latest articles. and in the "Syndication Feeds" module you will find the link to the new RSS feed with all selected articles. You can use that to publish your feed to Feedburner, to Google, and wherever you want. Don't forget to submit the RSS link to Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools to To make Google, Bing, Yahoo and all major searchengines happy too!
