Dealing with RSS feeds: Integrating Feedburner with Joomla

Joomla Training - Aaron Martin

If you use RSS for your site and you have a decent amount of traffic constantly flowing to your content, you really need to become friends with Feedburner, it can save your growing site. Feedburner is a free web 2.0 service that Google just purchased (in the last year or so) that takes RSS XML and translates them into a variety of different formats. It also provides statistics of how many people are subscribed to your content. It does this by pinging various different feed readers to figure out on average how many people are subscribed to you that day (its not an exact science, but it remains very very useful). Feedburner also allows you to mashup your content feeds with other feeds. For instance I have this blog feeding through Feedburner as well as my Del.icio.us bookmark feed for Joomla Packages . So whenever I find a site worth telling all you about I just bookmark it normally and it is mashed into Joomla Packages' developer feed .

I think though the best function of Feedburner is that it offloads subscription traffic to the larger bandwidth Google pipe. What does that mean? You'll need to know how RSS functions in order to understand Feedburner's worth. When a feed reader subscribes to your blog feed it opens its mouth to your content, which is great! Depending on the feed reader that your subscriber uses, it will then ping your site for new content every 15 mins, 10 mins, 5 mins...etc. This is the equivalent of driving in the car with those annoying children who keep saying, “are we there yet?” Since you promised to feed those mouths, you need to tell them that there is nothing new for them to read. Of course this isn't a huge problem when we are caching our feeds, but if you have a high-profile site (or plan to), then cache sometimes is not enough.

I've dealt with some high-profile political sites that were dealing with thousands of hits a day from real people and thousands more from spiders. Most of the spider traffic that these clients were dealing with were not from nice spiders (perhaps I'll go into detail some other time). The number one thing that they were pinging were the RSS feeds. If you are dealing with a Joomla site with multiple components, many of which have their very own RSS (comments, blog, forum,...) you may be in for a ride with rogue spiders who won't listen to robots.txt. The best way to deal with these issues is Feedburner. You'll turn all your syndication over to a system that does it better and can handle all the “are we there yet” pings.

Integrating Feedburner with Joomla.

Since I would deem this to be an Intermediate topic I expect you, my reader, are savvy enough to figure out the Feedburner interface. Just follow their directions and you'll be fine. I'm going to give you the information you need to make your Joomla work with Feedburner. We are at the cusp with Joomla, half of you use 1.0 the other half 1.5. I'm writing this tutorial to work with 1.0, you'll be able to take the concept into 1.5 but things might not translate exactly, I'm sorry. If you haven't already read our “Joomla Syndication via RSS ” blog, you might want to do so if you don't have Joomla Syndication already working as that will be a prerequisite for this tutorial.

Doing the Deed, Syncing the Feed

Find your syndication module on the front end. What we need is the feed URL. I suggest using RSS 2.0 as you can only choose one to give to Feedburner. The URL will look something like this

http://joomlapackages.com/component/option,com_rss/
-->			feed,RSS2.0/no_html,1/

or

http://joomlapackages.com/index.php?option=com_rss
-->			&feed=RSS2.0&no_html=1

depending on your SEF. If you haven't done so already register with Feedburner.com (its free) and create a new feed, use the feed from your site as “the original feed”. Create your own feed address, make sure it is something that you'll want permanently ours is “http://feeds.feedburner.com/JoomlaPackages-AdvancedTurn-keyJoomla”. We are going to use this Feedburner feed address on our own site now.

Showing the Feed.

Here's the problem. We need to keep our basic Joomla syndication module published so that we can feed Feedburner, but we don't want our readers to use our Joomla syndication, we want them to use Feedburner instead. The solution is to publish the Joomla syndication module but do so in a module position that your template doesn't show. Joomla only requires that the module be published for the syndication magic to happen, published doesn't necessarily mean “visible”. Find a module position or create one that your template doesn't render and publish you RSS to that module position.

Now all we need to do is to create an html module and put together a little display with an RSS icon in it. You can use the ones that Joomla comes with or find one on the web, they are everywhere! Link your RSS icon to your Feedburner feed address. Publish your module to the pages where RSS makes sense. You're done. When your user clicks on that icon they will be taken to Feedburner to complete the transaction.

Remember you still need to syndicate your content with Joomla for this to work. Feedburner is something you tack on to your already syndicated content to expand your sites RSS capabilities and offload RSS reader traffic and spider traffic to a larger and more efficient system than your standard web host.

I hope I didn't miss anything, but I'm sure I inevitably did. Feel free to leave comments or questions!