Once the plugin has been activated, a new submenu will be displayed underneath the Options tab. This document explains how to correctly configure the RSS Aggregator plugin in order to add new RSS feeds.
The admin menu contains the three following sections:
- The Category Section – When creating an RSS feed, you should assign an appropriate category to it. The categories allow the grouping of feeds by topic and are used to display the feeds of a specific category. The category section can be used to create new categories and to delete an existing category along with all the feeds associated to it.
- The Feeds Section – This section can be used to create new aggregated feeds as well as to delete existing feeds. When creating a new feed, you should specify its display name (which will be displayed in the blogs), URL and associated category.
- The RSS Aggregator Options Section – This section can be used to define technical aspects, such as the directory which contains the aggregated feeds, the time at which to update the feeds, etc.
The administration section can be used to add new feeds, which can be grouped into categories that allow the creation of templates to aggregate the desired feeds. To display the aggregated posts, you should add the relevant code to the get_posts_by_date function in the appropriate template. You should specify the category, or category array, of RSS feeds that you would like to be displayed as the parameter.
An example of the use of this plugin can be found in the linkfeeds_by_date.php file provided in the template. To display a page of aggregated feeds, you should create a new page and set up the Custom RSS Feeds By Date template, which produces and displays the aggregated posts and feeds. This is the same way that aggregated feeds are displayed on the Morfeo blog’s event page for each community project. The following function call is used:
get_posts_by_date(‘Events’)
The above function call aggregates the feeds that appear in the Events feed category, which can be found in the menu under Options/RSS Aggregator.
Another example of the use of the RSS Aggregator plugin can be seen in the projects menu bar, which contains the project’s relevant posts. The get_posts_by_date(‘Community’) function call has been added to make this possible.
This function, which can be found in the sidebar.php file, is used to appropriately display the posts of the relevant project before any other project, according to the size of the menu bar.
Please note that the blogs that receive information regarding events and/or posts about other projects must have the relevant feeds, which are categorised using the Events and/or Community categories. As previously mentioned, this categorisation can be carried out using the admin menu (Options/RSS Aggregator).
