How To Create A Consolidated RSS Feed For Joomla 1.7

After I upgraded this site and some others to Joomla 1.7 I was stumped how to create a consolidated RSS feed. The problem is that Joomla seems to assume your home page will be a rolling blog so they provide you with a module to install called Syndication Feeds. This module will automatically create the RSS feed of all the articles displayed on the blog layout page. Sounds good except many websites don't use the top level category blog layout menu item. Especially static sites for small businesses.

To get around this you still need to create a top level category blog but the trick is where to hide the menu item. I created my category blog menu item under my help menu and called it RSS. This way most people will ignore it.

When I initially clicked the new menu link the default settings only showed the categories and no articles. You need to go into the joomla menu options and set them like in the picture to the left. The main thing being that 'include sub categories' must be 'all'.

Now when you click your new RSS menu link it will show all your latest articles. Assigned the syndication feeds modules to the new RSS menu item. Now the page will show the RSS feed link generated from the syndication module.

Finally you have a consoidated RSS feed that you can paste into feedburner. Also don't forget to give the RSS link to google webmaster tools so Google will be happy too.

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Posted: 5 months, 3 weeks ago by josh #5

I've just added forum comments to this site again after serious Kunena bugs were finally fixed. Anyway I recieved this email which is basically a comment on this article and thought I'd post it here...


Reading about adding rss to joomla 1.7, more specifically 1.7.2
this is awful and a major joomla bug...

this process in 1.7.2 consumes a ton of ram and cpu cycles, any sort of hosting will start blocking your site because of intense resources consumed by this rss feed alone. have not tested against any other version of joomla but several Hosting companies block your domain and throttle the website using this.

To setup rss using this you need VPS for hosting normal shared hosting this will cause problems... 3 hosting companies later / several account and same results.

please do post the facts about this fact. or a workaround.

thx

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