Recently, I decided that one of the blogs I run needed to have more content. Although I post three to four times per week, I felt that this specific blog would benefit from more posts. After thinking about what kind of content would provide the most value to my visitors, I concluded that my readers would benefit most from current news about the subject of my blog.

After a lot of searching and experimenting, a found a simple plug-in that could do exactly what I needed: FeedWordPress.

FeedWordPress is an Atom/RSS aggregator for WordPress. It syndicates content from Atom or RSS that you choose into your WordPress blog.

This means that you can syndicate content from any blog, newsfeed or other source that you choose. Best of all, once it's setup, FeedWordPress runs automatically.

After you have downloaded FeedWordPress, uploaded it to your WordPress plug-ins folder and activated it from your WP admin panel, you can have several different customization options to choose from:



To add the feeds that you desire, simply add the blog, news source or other web site that you choose to your Blogroll and place it in the contributors category. Once you have added all the sources you want, click the Syndicated tab (under the Blogroll tab), click "Find Feed" next to each blog and FWP will automatically find the Atom or RSS feed for that source. You can also choose which of your blog categories you would like each of the feeds to be posted under.

After you've finished customizing and adding feeds, the last thing you need to do is create a cron job to automatically update your blog. If your host has a cPanel, this task is extremely easy. Simply click the Cron Job icon, paste in the following code:

cd $HOME/www/wp-content ; php -q update-feeds.php

(If your file path is different, be sure to update it accordingly),

and choose the interval at which you would like FWP to update your blog.



Once you have completed all of the steps listed above, FeedWordPress will check the RSS feeds you've chosen at the intervals you've selected. When it finds new content in the feeds, it will use it to automatically create new posts on your blog!

Very interesting. I'm sure this can come in handy for many folks

Question: Do they take care of filtering feeds so that you can only add content that falls under the cc license? Otherwise how do you avoid getting flamed by the original author?

Adrian,

You can choose to have each post published through FWP link directly to the original author, which would give them the proper credit they are entitled to.

Very helpful post. I have been told the following:

"Wordpress does have an RSS feed display plugin (maybe a handful), but you should know that they are java based and are not read as "content" as far as google is concerned. So if SEO is a huge concern and you don't have any other content, I would reconsider and do some actual blogging or content writing."

Is this true with respect to FeedWordPress?

Additionally, this post http://www.redefine.co.uk/blog/2007/02/15/piping-hot-mash/ suggests using FeedWordPress in conjunction with a Yahoo Pipe. Any comments on that? What solution do you think is preferable, and why?

Very interesting plugin. Never knew such things existed.

It works but the images will not carry over, does anyone know how to fix this?