The RSS Feed widget allows aggregation by RSS feed. This widget uses the built-in WordPress SimplePie library to parse RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, and Atom feeds. There is also built in caching (set on the WP-Drudge Options screen) to help reduce loading times and prevent penalties from the sites producing the feed.
- Click the down arrow next to the column in which you’d like to add the block of links.
- Drag a “WP-Drudge RSS Feed” widget into that column.
- Enter a “Title” or leave this field blank to not display one
- If you’d like a name for this widget which is not visible to your users, uncheck the “Show Title” box
- Type in or paste a direct URL to the RSS feed you’d like to display. Any valid (and some invalid) RSS 1.0 or 2.0 feed should work here
- Enter the number of links you’d like to display. This is limited by the number of RSS items on the feed you’re trying to display (typically between 10 and 20) and more links displayed could delay this feed’s loading
- Some RSS feeds come with a short excerpt of the post. If you’d like this blurb to show, check the “Show Description” checkbox
- If you’d like to truncate the description, enter a number to limit the characters shown. This will also strip out any HTML/images that are in the description.
- To display the post date from the feed items, check the “Show date posted” checkbox (this may not work for some feeds)
- The “Disable cache” checkbox should be checked in case you see an error message on the page where this widget appears (you’ll need to save it and check your page). Also try this option if this feed is not producing any links
- Click Save and refresh the page to see the links appear
I should note… there are definitely concerns with displaying several RSS feeds on the same page because you’re relying on multiple servers to serve information to your WordPress install. If you’re using the built-in feed caching for this widget and you’re still seeing slow-downs, try page caching using Batcache to see if that makes a difference.
