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!
