Turn public RSS feeds into a visual WordPress grid to publish external content in a cleaner, browsable layout.
Blog roll from Gadget Flow published on Medium platform – https://medium.com/feed/the-gadget-flow using our RSS feed parser.
What the RSS parser puts on your page
An RSS feed grid reads a public feed and turns every entry in it into a post in your own database. The grid above runs on a single feed address and the Classic skin, one column wide, with the date, the author, an excerpt and a Read More button under each image. No part of it is embedded from the publisher. The plugin fetches the feed on a schedule, creates one Social Item per entry, and copies the picture that came with it into your Media Library.
Pick this source when the writing belongs to someone else, or lives somewhere WordPress cannot query: another blog, a Medium publication, a podcast, a news site. When the posts are already in your own database, a posts grid is the better source, because it can narrow by taxonomy and order by date, title, ID, comment count or menu order. An RSS account has no taxonomy to filter on, so the Filter element finds nothing to list.
The RSS account form, field by field
Connecting a feed is three fields, and the parser reads any RSS or Atom document. The RSS feed reference lists the same fields with their defaults.
- URL takes the feed address, the same one a feed reader would use.
- Max Posts decides how many of the newest entries are pulled. It accepts 1 to 200 and defaults to 30.
- Name labels the account in the settings and fills itself in as RSS Account #1, #2 and so on.
- Title, description, date, link and author are imported for every entry.
- The image is the entry’s enclosure image, or the first image at the start of its description. An entry with neither shows the Placeholder Image from Settings → General.
- Order by is Date or Title, ascending or descending, and starts on Date descending.
- Display Comments Count covers YouTube, Vimeo and Flickr accounts, and Display Views Count covers YouTube and Flickr. An RSS entry carries neither number.
Wiring an RSS feed into a page
- Open Settings → Social Feeds → RSS, click + Connect, paste the feed address into URL, raise Max Posts if 30 is too few, and click Save Changes. The import starts on save.
- Add a Gallery block to a page, set Content Source to Social, pick RSS as the Network and your new account. Choose the Grid layout and the Classic skin, the only one with a Read More button under the caption.
- In Skin → Caption → Elements turn on Display Read More Button, then open Click Action and set Target to New Tab. That fills Rel with noopener noreferrer, so an entry opens on the site that published it.
Which side of the license RSS sits on
Everything about the presentation of this grid is in the free plugin. What a license buys is the Social content source and the importer behind it, which RSS shares with every other network in the list. The free and Pro comparison goes through the split feature by feature, and the pricing page covers the licenses.
- Free: the grid layout, the Classic skin with its date, author and excerpt, AJAX and paged pagination, lazy loading and the popup.
- Pro: the Social content source, every connected account, and the Social Items and Social Profiles screens the import writes to.
- Pro already contains the free plugin, so a Pro site installs one plugin and not two.
RSS questions we answer most
How quickly does a new article reach the grid?
An RSS account counts as stale after an hour, and a five-minute cron job refreshes one stale account per run. A full sync of every account runs every two hours. WordPress caches feeds for twelve hours on its own, so a fresh entry can take that long to appear whatever the plugin does. Sync All Accounts on the Social Items screen skips the wait, and the sync schedule spells the rest out.
Can I edit what the feed imported?
Yes. Each entry lands as a Social Item under Visual Portfolio → Social Items, where its title, content, image, format and links are all editable. A sync only adds entries it has not seen, so your edits survive later imports. Trashing an item drops it from the gallery and from every sync after that.
Where does the Read More button come from?
From the Classic skin, and no other skin has one. The rest link the whole item instead. Switch it on under Skin → Caption → Elements → Display Read More Button, either always or only for entries carrying a More tag. The steps are in adding a Read More button.
