RSS Widget

What is an RSS feed? An RSS feed is a format for delivering regularly changing web content. Many news-related sites, weblogs and other online publishers syndicate their content as an RSS Feed to whoever wants it. Every website in WordPress has a dedicated RSS feed for each of their posts, categories, and tags.

The RSS widget allows you to display the content of another website’s RSS feed onto your website.

To use the RSS widget:

step 1  Visit Appearance / Widgets in your main menu

Step 2  Drag the “RSS v2.0” widget from the left “Available Widgets” area to the right, into an open widget zone

Step 3  RSS v2.0 Widget SettingsCustomize the widget by filling out the available fields with your preferred options and hitting save:

  • URL to RSS feed: the actual URL to the RSS feed, e.g., http://news.health.ufl.edu/feed/  [required]
  • Title: the title displayed at the top of the feed, e.g., “UF HSC Recent News”  [optional]
  • Alternate URL for clickable Title: by default the title of the feed will be a link. The link destination is normally controlled by the feed itself. If you would like to change where the title links to, insert that URL here. e.g., http://news.health.ufl.edu  [optional]
  • Amount of posts to display: how many items from the feed should be displayed (recommend 3-5)  [required, default 5]
  • Show post thumbnails?: If your RSS feed contains images for each item, this option will attempt to display a thumbnail of those images next to the post. [optional]
  • Show summary/excerpt of post?: Will display a brief summary or excerpt from each item. [optional]
  • Show post published date?: Show the date when each item was published. [optional]
  • Show RSS icon next to title?: Display a small RSS icon next to the title of the feed. This icon will link users to the RSS feed directly so they can subscribe to it. [optional]
  • Order Alphabetically?: Will order the items alphabetically based on the title of each item. [normally sorted by publish date, optional]
  • Display only on page: Only displays the widget when viewing a specific page. [optional]

Sample

The below screenshot shows you the RSS widget in-use, pulling in an RSS feed from another website:

RSS Widget Example