"Burned" RSS feeds, improve your default forum feeds.

So, you activated the RSS feed of your forum, someone told you (most likely a user) that it would be a nice feature to have. But you maybe don't care one way or the other, it can't hurt, right?.

But then you start to wonder how it is being used, or maybe how could you promote it's use, since you've heard that it can become a good way to publicize your forum. The bad news is, well, the RSS and other feed implementations in vBulletin are very basic, you're not able to offer your feed in other more esoteric formats, such as ATOM. You're not able to know how your feeds are being used, at least know how many hits has generated, or how many subscribers do you have, or in what apps or webservices is being used, such as google reader/google homepage, my Yahoo!, my AOL or Newsgator.

Enter Feedburner (http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/about). With a good set of free tools, Feedburner greatly improves control and presentation of your feed (http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/feed101) to your potential subscribers. For starters, you can have a web browser friendly preview of your feed, instead of showing the raw XML code for previous versions of IE and Firefox (current ones show their own previews). You also have basic stats (number of subscribers and what kind of webapp or reader/aggregator are they using). Also, with just activating one option, you can translate your feed automagically to a good variety of feed formats, such as other versions of RSS or ATOM and so make it compatible with almost any kind of application or reader.

To "burn" your feeds, you just need to create a free account (paid services include more advanced stats, all other services are free) and add your current feed URL, you know, the http://www.yoursite.com/forum/external.php address. Once you're done, you have a slightly more intuitive url (http://feeds.feedburner.com/YourFeedName), then you can start playing with other settings, as Feedburner gives you a centralized place where you can control many usable aspects of all your forum feeds.

For instance, have you ever wanted to setup a different feed title and description for a single forum feed?. With a default vBulletin this is next to impossible to do. If you have both the general feed and the single forum feed burned you can do it quite easily just by going to the Title/Description Burner options in the Optimize tab of your Feedburner panel.

Do you have a podcast feed?, while the podcast feed tools in vBulletin are adequate, managing your feed inside Feedburner provides you a wider and easier control of the feed, making it also more compatible with other services apart from Itunes.

So what's the catch?, none that I have been able to discern. Feedburner is a service that has quite a few years under his belt, and it can also help you monetize your feeds if you choose to participate in their own ad network, which is why they can offer so many services free of charge, but that's totally optional.

Also, be sure to edit your headinclude template to change the default auto-discovery tag of your forum to the "burned" feed. For this you must look for the following code in the aforementioned template:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="$vboptions[bbtitle] RSS Feed" href="external.php?type=RSS2" />
And make the following edits:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Your Feed Title" href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/YourFeedName" />Have fun with your burned feeds!

Very nice - Great thing to do...

Yeah, and fairly easy to do.

Thanks for this Hell, great idea and well explained...I am currently looking into implementing it. :)

Moving this thread to Tutorials and How To's

Once you have 'burned a feed' is it still possible to pull content from one or more forums like you can with the standard vbulletin RSS feeds..currently we do this using the following..

http://www.domainname.com/forums/external.php?type=rss2&forumids=14,19,32

Is there an equivalent for the burned feed do you know?

No, there is no equivalent to that in the burned feed, but you can continue to use the regular feed for that purpose, but if you want to have the stats and other fancy stuff you should burn the url from the forums you're interested the most.

Cheers...I thought I could be clever and burn a feed like above..it works perfectly but I ran in to an issue when I then tried to burn a second feed from the same site using different forum ids, it then outputs the same burned feed url as the first, thus overwriting the first with the second :(

It was worth a try ;)

Yeah you will have to save it using a different name than the first. Which is not that bad, for example, you have a busy off topic forum, you could burn its feed with a name like MySite-Offtopic, then you have a separate burned feed. The autodiscovery tag becomes trickier since you will have to use an additional nested conditional than the one that already exists, something like <if condition="$foruminfo[forumid] = X">. I haven't tested it, so I don't know if that conditional will work.

There is no code to edit... am I missing something?

Somehow the template code didn't got posted in my previous message, I'll have to think a little again since I haven't used it and don't recall it on memory.

just wonderfully explained i was searching for this thanks a bunch

I have a question on Burned feed. Apparantly when I burn a forum feed through feedburner all the meta information such as who posted the thread, when it was posted, comes through with it instead of just the title and text. How can I change that?

Thanks

:confused: My burnt feed content is identical to the vB default feed. And that includes all that "extra" content.

And also even if I say show 1000 characters (or 5000 chars) from the feed, the feed only just contains the meta info - who started the thread and when .... nothing of the body .... is there a way that can be changed?

Where are you changing these settings?

You are probably using 0.91 format instead of the 2.0, make sure your forum feed URL says something like http://www.yoursite.com/forum/external.php?type=RSS2

You must be using a version previous to 3.6.0 where the RSS 2.0 feed became the default (I think it was in 3.6.0 :P).

I am actually using 3.6.8 :(

But I will try your tip and check.

Thanks :) Well that made the difference ... Thanks :cheers3: