Custom RSS feeds in WordPress

RSS feeds are very useful and very popular. WordPress creates RSS feeds by default, but how to create your own, custom RSS Feed?

If you need a custom RSS feed, like for example, a feed indexing only somes categories and tags, or if you redirected all WordPress RSS feeds to Feedburner but still want to be able to get a category feed, there’s an easy solution though, just follow these steps:

1. create a custom page template within your theme that serves out the feed (code below)
2. create a new page (which can be blank), with a secret URL
3. use your newly created “Custom Feed” template for that page
4. open the secret URL in your browser

Simply paste the following code in a new file, save it under the name custom-feed.php and upload it on your theme directory.

Once done, simply write a new page in WordPress Dashboard (Don’t type any text it in), and select custom-feed.php as a page template.

<?php
/*
Template Name: Custom Feed template
*/

$numposts = 5;

function livexp_rss_date( $timestamp = null ) {
  $timestamp = ($timestamp==null) ? time() : $timestamp;
  echo date(DATE_RSS, $timestamp);
}

function livexp_rss_text_limit($string, $length, $replacer = '...') {
  $string = strip_tags($string);
  if(strlen($string) > $length)
    return (preg_match('/^(.*)\W.*$/', substr($string, 0, $length+1), $matches) ? $matches[1] : substr($string, 0, $length)) . $replacer;
  return $string;
}

$posts = query_posts(’showposts=’.$numposts);

$lastpost = $numposts - 1;

header(”Content-Type: application/rss+xml; charset=UTF-8″);
echo ‘<?xml version=”1.0″?>’;
?><rss version=”2.0″>
<channel>
  <title>Live Experience E-mail Update</title>
  <link>http://livexp.net/</link>
  <description>The latest blog posts from livexp.net.</description>
  <language>en-us</language>
  <pubDate><?php livexp_rss_date( strtotime($ps[$lastpost]->post_date_gmt) ); ?></pubDate>
  <lastBuildDate><?php livexp_rss_date( strtotime($ps[$lastpost]->post_date_gmt) ); ?></lastBuildDate>
  <managingEditor>info@livexp.net</managingEditor>
<?php foreach ($posts as $post) { ?>
  <item>
    <title><?php echo get_the_title($post->ID); ?></title>
    <link><?php echo get_permalink($post->ID); ?></link>
    <description><?php echo ‘<![CDATA['.livexp_rss_text_limit($post->post_content, 500).'<br/><br/>Keep on reading: <a href="'.get_permalink($post->ID).'">'.get_the_title($post->ID).'</a>'.']]>’;  ?></description>
    <pubDate><?php livexp_rss_date( strtotime($post->post_date_gmt) ); ?></pubDate>
    <guid><?php echo get_permalink($post->ID); ?></guid>
  </item>
<?php } ?>
</channel>
</rss>

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• Displaying Wordpress Category RSS Feed Link
• Insert ads on your wordpress RSS feed
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