No doubt about it, RSS feeds on 1.5 are better than they were on 1.0. Not perfect, but certainly better.
Instead of a single feed, the 1.5 RSS feed that appears in the browser bar is always changing because it shows only the articles on that page. You can see a good example at http://community.joomla.org.
This did lead to one problem I found the other day … its sometimes difficult to produce a full RSS feed for all the articles on your site.
Solution #1: Publish All Articles to the Frontpage
This works well for two situations:
- If you already publish all articles to the frontpage.
- If you don’t use Joomla’s default frontpage. In this case you can safely promote all the articles to the frontpage because its hidden.
However, if you pick and choose your frontpage articles, you’ll need another solution
Solution #2: Use Feederator
Now this is a great component! Feederator is bascially a big improvement over older RSS generators. Its free and works on both 1.0 and 1.5. You can create as many RSS feeds as you want, including a full feed for the site. The one major limitation I see is that you can’t select several sections for a single RSS feed.
Also available is a premium version which costs $19 and imports RSS feeds, allowing you to place them in content items. Support at Recly.com is active and friendly. I found a small bug and Anton, the developer, fixed it in minutes.
Note: If you use #1 or #2 and want to add the RSS feed to the browser bar, you’ll need to turn off the default RSS feeds by going to Menus >> Main Menu >> Parameters (Advanced) >> Show a Feed Link >> No