Maria’s Guides

A WordPress plugin to add links to RSS feeds.

On pages 165-166 of WordPress 2: Visual QuickStart Guide, Miraz and I discuss CG-Feedread, a plugin that enables you to list the titles (with links) of posts on another blog based on RSS feed content. We use the plugin on our WPVQS.com Web site to list content from Miraz’s Mactips.info site and my An Eclectic Mind site.

I hate to admit it, but I never really liked that plugin. It came as part of a package and I was only interested in that one part. So today, while attempting to add the same feature to two of my WordPress-based sites, I looked for a different, simpler solution. And I found it: RSSImport by Frank Bueltge.

RSSImport is a one-trick pony. It enables you to add a list of posts from any RSS feed. There are four options: the number of posts to list, the URL of the feed, whether the list should include descriptions, and whether the post title should be truncated to 30 characters.

You install and activate the plugin like any other plugin. (You can refer to Chapter 7 of our book or consult the documentation that comes with the file if you need help.) Then place the following code in your template file — most likely sidebar.php — where you want the list to appear:

<?php RSSImport(10,
"http://feeds.feedburner.com/mariasguides"
,false,false); ?>

The options go between the parentheses. In this example, I’ll pull 10 posts from the Maria’s Guides feed, exclude the description, and disable the 30-character limit on posts. The result looks like this on An Eclectic Mind. As you can see, I included a heading before the code so the list would blend in with the rest of my sidebar content.

And if you look on the Maria’s Guides site, you’ll see a similar list for an Eclectic Mind. (The two sites used to be one and they’re still somewhat “joined at the hip.”)

I recommend the plugin if you’re looking for a simple solution to list another blog’s posts. But if you want to list multiple blogs’ posts in the same list, CG-Feedread is probably a better solution.