The Joomlashack Blog

Importing RSS Feeds Into Joomla Articles

Written by Steve Burge Steve Burge
Published: 08 February 2010 08 February 2010

This tutorial will show you how to take an RSS feed and import it into your  Joomla site. Each item on the RSS feed will become a separate Joomla article. We use this technique for a couple purposes:

  • Distributing our content to other Joomla sites. For example, we use this technique to showing these tutorials on other sites in our network.
  • Importing blogs and news on a particular topic from other sites. This way people can read them all in one place.

We're going to use a component called 4RSS from 4RSS.com.

Installing and Configuring 4RSS

  • Go to the 4RSS page on the Joomla Extensions Directory and download the file.
  • You'll see a file on your desktop with a name very similar to com_4ss_1.3.06.zip
  • Go to the administrator area of your Joomla site, then Extensions >> Install / Uninstall.
  • Click "Browse" to locate the package file and then click "Upload File and Install".
  • Go to Components >> 4RSS
  • Click "New" in the top-right corner and you'll see a screen like the one below:

    rssimport

These are the settings you'll need to enter:

  • RSS Feed Title: This is just for your own use. It will never show on the front-end.
  • Feed Post URL: The address of the RSS feed you want to import.
  • Section / Category: Where the new articles will be created.
  • KeyWord: If you'd only like to import articles that mention a particular keyword, insert it here.
  • Frontpage: Do you want to publish these to the frontpage of your site?
  • Include link to original: Highly recommended to click "Yes" in nearly all circumstance. This will insert a link back to the article's original location with the text "read full article". You don't want search engines to get confused as to which page is the original.
  • Screen for Duplicates: Should 4RSS check to see whether any feeds have already been imported? Again, "Yes" is highly recommended.

Importing the RSS Feeds

Now that you're set up, there are two ways to import feeds:

  • Manually: In Components >> 4RSS, select the feeds you want to import and then click "Post" in the top-right corner.
  • Automatically: In Components >> 4RSS you can click the "4RSS CRON" tab. This is a little trickier and will depend on your server for the correct setup. Each hosting company will have a different place to setup cron jobs so you will need to check with them. The developer's support forum may be able to help. One common entry that may work is:

Php -q/home/......./public_html/administrator/com_4rss/cronjob_4rss/cronjob.php > /dev/null 2>&1