| Feed Me – Adding a FeedBurner feed to a Joomla! Site |
|
OK, a really technical post today and I author it simply because it has taken me so long to get here that I hope this post may save someone else some of my pain. It all started first thing this morning as I was checking my Google Analytics report for my site. Because I’ve started blogging, I was hoping there will be a bump in traffic this week. Indeed, I did have a few hits on my blog page which made me ask myself the question; ‘How many people are subscribed to my blog’? As background, this site is built on the Open Source content management system (CMS) Joomla! OK, a really technical post today and I author it simply because it has taken me so long to get here that I hope this post may save someone else some of my pain. It all started first thing this morning as I was checking my Google Analytics report for my site. Because I’ve started blogging, I was hoping there will be a bump in traffic this week. Indeed, I did have a few hits on my blog page which made me ask myself the question; ‘How many people are subscribed to my blog’? As background, this site is built on the Open Source content management system (CMS) Joomla! I highly recommend it and am supporting a number of client sites across a number of hosts. Above all else, Joomla! has removed any skepticism I had about using Open Source, it is sophisticated, stable and ready for production systems. I was using the basic syndication services provided by the tool, all the articles in my feed use a unique section and category and I display them from a menu item on the site. These native services are fine but they cannot provide the reporting I was looking for and it didn’t take much research before I concluded that what I needed was to start to use Google’s Feedburner service in order to get the information I needed. I started with searching the net for any information from people who have walked this road before and unfortunately I did not get a lot of help but I found a couple of posts that enabled me to work out the process. What I’ll give you here is the minimal steps that I found I needed, even though I didn’t do them in this order although if I only knew then what I know now… When I had my feed set up using Joomla’s native services, a user subscribed to a feed using the feed link http://www.devizessolutions.com/devizes-solutions-small-business-blog.html.feed?type=rss#. By default FeedBurner’s links would’ve looked like http://feeds2.feedburner.com/DevizesSolutions but using FeedBurner’s MyBrand (registration required) functionality I was able to end up with the link http://feeds.devizessolutions.com/DevizesSolutions which I felt was much better. To achieve this I set up FeedBurner to use the sub-domain feeds.devizessolutions.com and then went to my web host to add a CNAME record to my DNS settings. This process is specific to your host and is, as Google puts it ‘not for the faint of heart’. However, this is the hardest step and once complete and propagated across the web the rest is fairly straight forward. The next step was one I worked out for myself and that is to turn off the native syndication services. Firstly by disabling or uninstalling any ‘mod_syndicate’ modules via the Module Manager then I changed the default settings of all Menu Items that display Articles. Using the Menu Item Manager for each Item I clicked the Parameters (Advanced) tab and set the Show a Feed Link property to ‘No’. Next I modified my template’s HTML by going to the Extensions and Template Manager then select and Edit the appropriate template then selected Edit HTML from the toolbar. I added the code into the head section as prescribed by sonnyp, in my case it was inserting < link href="/http://feeds.devizessolutions.com/DevizesSolutions" rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Devizes Solutions Small Business Blog"> (NOTE: Remove the space after the <, my editor is mangling my quoted code) At this point things were working great, but I wanted to add one more thing and that was to place a ‘Follow this feed’ link directly on my blog page rather than just using the default browser functionality. To do this I went to the Content, Section Manager and placing the following HTML in the Description section; < a href="/http://feeds.devizessolutions.com/DevizesSolutions" title="Subscribe to my feed" rel="alternate"> And that was pretty much that. Obviously you will have to change the domains listed to point to your site. I hope this helps. This content is © Copyright Devizes Solutions 2009. If you quote it or find it useful please credit and link back to www.DevizesSolutions.com.
|
