Category Feeds
A number of my WordPress clients recently have been wishing for a way to offer multiple feeds with specific posts in them completely unaware that this is actually very easy to do with WordPress without any modifications.
You can simply accomplish specific content feeds by using category feeds. For example. If you have a WordPresssports site with 3 categories: Football, Baseball, Hockey and you want to offer a feed specific to each category – all you would need to do is to add “/feed/” to the end of the category URL.
Example: Your category feed is: http://www.sports.com/category/football. For this site – your category feed for football would be: http://www.sports.com/category/football/feed.
Advertising multiple feeds for your site can be very attractive for a few reasons:
- Better Focus You can offer subject specific feeds since not all people like to read about everything. (ex. A reader likes your site for your coverage on a certain subject matter – but does not really care or come back for posts about anything else. Ex. With category feeds – you can really let the user/reader decide what they want content to read about on your site.
- More Options = Happy Readers People like options. You would be surprised how many people get excited to pick and choose what they want to subscribe to vs. getting everything all at once. If they are forced to get all the content and only 15% of your content pertains to something they do not care about – they are likely to not subscribe at all or after awhile – stop reading your feed. If you offer some choice – people are more likely to subscribe because they will only get the content that they care about.
- Featured Posts If you want to offer a special feed for “featured” posts – all you need to do is make certain posts in a category called “Featured” and you then offer a hand selected featured posts feed to your readers.
If you want to list all your categories and their feed links, you can simply add this into your WordPress theme:
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