This is really a great feature!

Did this take a lot of work or was it something simple? I have wanting to do something like this myself, but haven’t a clue how to even begin.

I can see that this might be something that people who lurk around on my site might want to avoid seeing all the nonsense posts (to them anyway) and see only what they want to see.

Of course, a cooler feature would be to have checkboxes next to each catagory, if the checkbox is checked, they get that category in their feed. This would allow tons of flexability, but I’m sure it would be a bear to setup on the server side.

The method I used was pretty simple and takes advantage of the unusual way in which EE handles category displays. I’ll do up another entry on the method I used and post it to the EE Tips category.

I’m considering a move to EE and per category syndication is a REALLY big deal to me. I posted on the forums & an admin pointed me to you for some insight. I notice that you have the per category feeds working, but I couldn’t find any details on “how” just yet.

Can you give me a brief overview or code example?

Not to diss EE in any way. However, WordPress also supports category RSS feeds. In fact, it supports just about anything you can display as a feed, monthly archives, yearly archives, single posts, etc… I don’t really know what use that would be, but it supports it.

The best part is it’s free, really easy to install (5 minutes, really!). The only downside I have with it so far is the documentation could be tons better.

Another great feature in WP1.5 is you can “write pages” that you can then use as pages in your website. Much easier to make content than creating pages by hand.

I could go on and on, but I think Les might get upset with me.

Become a bit of a WP advocate there, Dave? It’s true that WP has some nice stuff in it, but the little experience I had with it left a sour taste in my mouth.

Anyway, I thought I’d written up instructions on how to do this already, but it appears I posted it over at the EE Forums rather than here.

Turns out EE will make an RSS feed for just about anything that uses the standard index page. You just feed it through the rss template of your choice rather than the index template. The following code is how I do it:

{exp:weblog:categories weblog="weblog1"}
<a href="{path=weblog/rss_2.0}" title="RSS 2.0 Category Feed">
<span style="border:1px solid;border-color:#FC9 #630 #330 #F96;padding:0 3px;font:8px verdana,sans-serif;color:#FFF;background:#F60;text-decoration:none;margin:0;">
XML</span></a>&nbsp;<a href="{path=weblog/index}">{category_name}</a> <br />
{/exp:weblog:categories}

Basically, I’m just feeding the standard category archive through the RSS 2.0 template and letting it handle the rest. You’d want to change the weblog parameter to match the shortname for your blog and the paths to point to the proper template.

Thanks, Les. That rocks! I’m out on the WP/EE/MT debate. For larger sites, EE is the choice because it scales very well & it enables a membership model - something that neither WP nor MT can offer out of the box.

WP has members. In fact, WP has 9 levels of members, 10 if you count the admin level. Even WP1.2.2 has those levels.

As to how well WP scales to larger sites. :shrug: I couldn’t speak to that. My site pretty small. I know I have faster page loads with WP over EE. My page loads in EE were approaching 6.5 secs, WP is hitting 1.5 secs. I’m currently seeing longer loads due to a statistics engine that is slowing it down. I wasn’t even able to use the statistics engine in EE.

Ah well, that’s the bueaty of this country. We are all free to make our own decisions. At least it used to be that way.