How to edit feeds in Wordpress 2.7?

February 19, 2009 11:57 AM

I use Wordpress 2.7. How do I edit the RSS feed(s)? Please help me troubleshoot my situation ...

Please help a gal out! I want to insert ads into my feed -- direct ads, not Adsense ads -- ideally every nth post but I'm having trouble getting them to show up at all, so that's my question for now.

I'm using Wordpress 2.7, and OpenX to serve ads. I also use Feedburner Feedsmith to redirect my feeds to Feedburner.

I tried to insert an html ad invocation code (built using these instructions from OpenX) using the Better Feed plugin (which you can use to add various things to your post footer), but all that ended up showing up in the feed was the code. Better Feed does successfully display tags and categories for each post.

I tried to go into the feed template according to these instructions, but they all seem to be redirected elsewhere. But if Better Feeds is inserting tags and categories, doesn't the feed template live somewhere on my server? If so, where? Do I need to get rid of Feedburner to make this all work?

Please let me know what other info/code/etc I can provide.

(Yes, I tried the wordpress forums, but didn't have any luck getting a response.)

posted by kmel to computers & internet (8 comments total)

Odds are that feedburner is not your problem. I don't see any reason why you shouldn't be able to do what you're wanting to do.

Is the HTML showing up in the Preview as well? Or does it look fine in the preview and then break in the RSS?
posted by toomuchpete at 2:02 PM on February 19

It is showing the HTML in Better Feed's preview.
posted by kmel at 2:11 PM on February 19

I'm not sure why it's not working for you -- if you're actually putting the correct code into the better feeds footer box it should be working just fine.

It sounds to me like you're putting escaped code in rather than the actual HTML.

When you first enable better feeds is the HTML that shows up there working properly?
posted by toomuchpete at 2:42 PM on February 19

Escaped code - what's that?

As for the last question -- I don't know, the plugin is activated, I don't enable/disable it. Should I?
posted by kmel at 8:51 PM on February 19

Escaped code is basically a way for you to tell the browser that the characters you're putting in aren't special and should be displayed instead of interpreted. It's the way you can get HTML to show up on a web page. For example, if you put: "&lt;" in HTML instead of "<", the less-than symbol will show up on the page instead of starting a tag.

In other words:

&lt;b&gt;Hello!&lt;/b&gt;

Shows when you view the page as:

<b>Hello!</b>

Instead of:

Hello!

That said, I don't think Better Feeds would do that without you noticing since it's not WYSIWYG. One thing to try is to either create a new test WordPress installation and try with the default theme and no other plugins to see if you have the same problem. Or take your site and disable all of the other plugins and switch to the default theme. If Better Feeds starts working, re-enable plugins/your theme one at a time until it breaks to find out which plugin is not compatible.

If that doesnt' work, it might help to see screen shots of what you've put in the Better Feeds box and what is showing up in the RSS.
posted by toomuchpete at 6:51 AM on February 20

Thanks toomuchpete ...

I wrote to the Better Feeds author and he said I have to use a Javascript code, that the php within the html invocation code won't work. I will try Javascript.

I still haven't figured out how to edit my feed in wordpress directly, though, so if anyone knows how to do that, please chime in ...
posted by kmel at 1:26 PM on February 20

You really can't. The feeds in WordPress are generated on the fly. The most direct way you can edit them is by creating a plugin and hooking a filter onto the feed creation process.

If you meant that you want to mess around with the template, those can be found (at least in 2.7) in /wp-includes/ in the various files called feed-*.php (feed-atom.php, feed-rdf.php, feed-rss2.php, etc) although you have to be careful about doing stuff directly to the WordPress code because a) you'll have to re-do it every time WordPress upgrades and b) it's difficult to figure out just what impact those changes are going to have.
posted by toomuchpete at 6:42 AM on February 22

Thanks very much. I appreciate it!

The ads finally worked with the Javascript invocation code plugged into Better Feeds.
posted by kmel at 7:21 AM on February 22