This presentation will present ideas and strategies for syndicating content in WordPress using RSS. WordPress, the popular “more-than-just-blogging” CMS, has built in powerful tools for generating RSS feeds, making filtering by author, keyword or category incredibly easy. And with a simple plugin, you can bring together multiple RSS feeds from a network of WordPress blogs (and other RSS sources) to build a portal of syndicated content. This could be a great way to gather content from students or educators into one site; student publishing their self-reflections could be pulled together into one site, filtered by topic or keyword. RSS is far from a dead technology, it’s a powerful way to share and syndicate content, opening the door to exciting possibilities.

1. Hi, my name is Scott, and I love WordPress
• Does WordPress need an introduction?
• About 1/3 of the web is run on
WordPress.
• When I was a teacher at TAFE NSW,
one of the units I taught was a CMS
unit using WordPress.
• The first conference I spoke at was a
WordPress conference!
• WordCamp Sydney 2014
• Easy to learn, easy to extend
• Under looked in education?
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2. RSS - Really Simple Syndication
• Alternatively: Rich Site Summary
• RSS is…
• …a way to publish an “article” on a website to a web feed.
• With an aggregator, you can then read that feed.
• …totally dead. No one is using it any more. Almost.
• Twitter no longer offers RSS feeds.
• Facebook no longer offers RSS feeds.
• Google discontinued its aggregator.
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3. RSS - Perhaps not dead yet…
• WordPress has very powerful RSS feed generation
• Your entire blog has a feed (i.e. all the articles)
• Authors can have feeds
• Comments have feeds
• Specific Categories and Tags can have feeds
• Extremely flexible in what you’re broadcasting
• https://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Feeds
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4. I added a number of tags,
including “TAFE”. I also
added this to the Category
of “Commentary”.
Remember, Categories
are big topics that your
blog is about. Tags are
keywords that this article
is about.
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So here’s a post I
wrote last year about
TAFE.

5. WordPress Feed Generation
• The WordPress Codex has a great page on Feeds:
https://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Feeds
• There are many feeds we can generate
• For example, a tag feed looks this:
http://www.example.com/tag/tagname/feed
• So, for my example, I need to replace the protocol, the domain and
the tag slug.
https://scott.technology/tag/tafe/feed
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6. In case you don’t know the
slug, check out your tags in
WordPress…
You can edit your slug as
well, but WordPress does
a good job of picking slugs.
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…and there’s your
slug!

7. Syndicating Content into WordPress
• Our teacher Dr. E. Xample is going to get her students to blog about
the course.
• Students could do this in Moodle:
• from their profile.
• from the Blog Menu block.
• Students could also do this externally
• From their own self hosted or WordPress.com WordPress blogs
• From a Tumblr blog
• Just add “/rss” to the end of a Tumblr url
• From a Blogger blog
• https://support.google.com/blogger/answer/97933?hl=en for
instructions on how
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8. Let’s do a little blogging in
Moodle. I’m going to “Add an
entry about this course.”
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Not shown on this screen,
but you can add tags to
Moodle blog entries.

9. There are many WordPress
plugins for RSS. A search for
RSS turns up 151 pages of
results.
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10. I’ve been using
FeedWordPress to syndicate
content and I’m fairly happy
with it.
ProTip: Look for plugins that
are updated often and are
used by many people.
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11. After you install
FeedWordPress, click on
Syndicated Sites in the
menu.
Add your RSS link that you
copied from Moodle to the
New source and hit Add.
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12. @kshuntley#eportforum #epfwprss @kshuntley
Different plugins will have different settings and
interfaces, so I don’t want to focus on this plugin too
much
Most will have
• Ability to add a username & password for restricted
feed.
• Ability to import & match tags.
• Ability to add tags & categories to imported posts.
• Set the schedule for how often feeds are checked.
• What to do if the posts on the feed have changed.

13. One setting I like to turn on is hold the
post for review in Pending so I can
tweak it for my blog.
But I could have published right away!
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14. Another setting I like is the ability to
assign a category to posts from this feed.
I use this for syndicated blog posts I
wrote for the blog for the last company I
worked with.
You can also
automatically tag your
syndicated posts.
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15. For my purposes, I just
assigned all articles on
this feed to myself.
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One thing to watch out for
is unmatched authors; it will
try to match authors to
users of the WordPress
blog.

16. The Moodle blog post is
now showing up in my
WordPress posts (as
Pending).
The time is when I
posted it on
Moodle, 24
minutes ago.
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17. It looks like it’s come across
almost perfect.
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Even my Moodle tag has
come across.
A beautiful thing!

18. @kshuntley#eportforum #epfwprss @kshuntley
With my former company,
when syndicating blog posts
from their blog to my site,
adding to the “Syndicated”
category.
This text widget would only
show in the sidebar for this
category, explaining the content
was syndicated, with a link to
the company blog.
Those settings are under
“Visibility” when you add a
text widget to your site.

19. • WordPress has fantastic built-in RSS feed generation tools.
• Creative use of tags and categories can build very specific feeds.
• Moodle can generate RSS feeds from a number of Activities - maybe you can do
something fun with the Glossary or Database activity.
• Blogging in Moodle generates an RSS feed, but other blogging platforms out there as
well.
• Think of the clever use of tagging and categorising incoming syndicated posts.
• Tap into other aspects of WordPress, such as menus dedicated to a category or
widgets with selective visibility
• Find a good syndication plugin for WordPress. I like FeedWordPress but see what works
for you.
• Have fun exploring!
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Take Aways

20. Thank You!
Questions?
Continue the conversation:
@kshuntley#eportforum #epfwprss @kshuntley
www.scott.technology
scott@kshuntley.com
kenneth.huntley3@tafensw.edu.au@kshuntley
www.linkedin.com/in/kshuntley/
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