In my most recent blog post about my 10 favorite Joomla! extensions, I embedded a news feed from X / Twitter to show the latest posts using the #t10jx tag on X / Twitter. Initially, I thought about finding a plugin that handled displaying an RSS feed in an article, since that would be the easiest way to accomplish what I wanted. Then I remembered the "Load Module" plugin and the "Feed Display" module that are part of a core Joomla! installation. I realized that I could embed the feed without installing any 3rd-party extensions. Read on to find out how to do it.
Step 1: Set up the Load Module plugin
The first thing you need to do is navigate to the plugin manager in your Joomla! Administrator panel. In Joomla! 1.5, you can access the plugin manager by clicking Extensions->Plugin Manager in the administrator main menu. In the plugin manager, locate the "Content - Load Moudle" plugin. If you have a lot of plugins, it might help to filter the list to only show content plugins. The filter is in the top right hand corner above the page just above the list of plugins. Under "Select Type", select "content."
Once you have located the Load Module plugin, click on it to open it in the plugin editor. First, make sure the plugin is enabled. Then set its style however you choose. The style is the way in which modules will be loaded via this plugin. I prefer to choose "Wrapped by Divs", "Wrapped by Multiple Divs" or "No wrapping (raw output)" because those offer cleaner, more semantic output. Once you have set the parameters how you want them, save the changes you have made to the plugin.
Step 2: Create module you wish to display
You can display any type of module you want to display through this plugin. To display an RSS feed, you need to create a Feed Display module.
First, navigate to the module manager by clicking Extensions->Module Manager in the administrator menu. Then, click new in the toolbar to create a new module. A list of module types will be displayed. In that list, select "Feed Display" to create a module that displays an RSS feed.
Module position
You can choose any module position to display this module because the Load Module plugin lets you specify any module position. A good idea is to choose some name that will not interfere with the other module positions on the site because you do not want to display this module anywhere but in an article. For my article, I chose "tjx", but you could use anything. For the "position" parameter, simply delete the position that is currently selected and type the position name you wish to use.
Module parameters
Under the module's parameters, be sure and set the feed URL. Otherwise, the module won't work properly. The rest of the parameters can be set however you want according to how you want the module to display.
Step 3: Embedding the module into an article
Now that the Load Module plugin and Feed Display module are set the way you want them, you are ready to embed the module into an article. To embed the module, you simply need to add the following plugin tag to your article:
{loadposition position_name}
Make sure you set position_name to the name of the module position you chose in Step 2. In my case, the tag looked like this:
{loadposition tjx}
That's all there is to it. The module position is now loaded into your article with the Feed Display module that you set up, so you now have an RSS feed embedded in an article.
Questions/Comments
Questions and comments are always welcome. I hope you have found this useful.
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