WiscWeb - WordPress UW Theme - Embedding RSS Feeds

These instructions can be used to place an RSS feed into a UW Theme page in WordPress. RSS Feeds are a way of delivering external news content to your website in a way that keeps them regularly updated. The UW WordPress Theme can use RSS feeds, however it does require you to use 'shortcode' to import that into a text block on a page.

NOTE: For information on how to use a feed from UW-Madison News, be sure to also see the sample at the bottom of this page.

Steps

  1. Navigate to the page you'd like to add your RSS Feed to.

    'Edit page' screen in WiscWeb

  2. Add in a Text Block

    One column content layout with a Text Block

  3. In the Text Block, either in Visual or Text mode, paste in the following code:

    [uw-rss-feed url="https://urlgoeshere.com" title="Title of RSS Feed" description="Description of RSS Feed" more-link="https://urlgoeshere.com" max-posts="x"]

    Text block displaying an RSS feed shortcode

  4. Change the URL text (between the two quotation marks) to be the URL of the RSS Feed. This URL will likely end in .rss or something similar.

    Text Block displaying RSS feed shortcode with the URL highlighted

  5. Change the Title text (between the two quotation marks) to the title that you want displayed above the RSS feed

    Text Block displaying RSS feed shortcode with the title highlighted

  6. Change the Description text (between the two quotation marks) to a short description of what the RSS feed is and what kind of information it is pulling in.

    Text Block displaying RSS feed shortcode with the description highlighted

  7. Change the More Link text (between the two quotation marks) to the URL of the main webpage where the feed can be found.

    Text Block displaying RSS feed shortcode with the "more link" highlighted

  8. Change the max-posts text (between the two quotation marks) to the number of articles you would like to display. We recommend no more than 10, but please note that the max-posts option has a maximum value of 15.

    Text Block displaying RSS feed shortcode with the "max posts" highlighted

  9. Update your page when ready.

Sample

In some cases, when using a site that doesn't have a traditional .rss URL, you may need to add a /feed/ to the end of a URL. For example, when you are trying to use a news feed from UW-Madison News, you would first find the category or tag that you want to create a feed for. 

Do this by clicking on a menu Category option, such as Science & Technology. Once you have that page loaded, http://news.wisc.edu/science-technology/, type in the word feed after the slash at the end of the URL (http://news.wisc.edu/science-technology/feed/) and hit enter. This will show some code on the screen, but you will copy the URL value.

RSS screen with URL value

You could also do the same for a tag, for example http://news.wisc.edu/tag/science/feed/ for a news feed about articles that are tagged science.

This is the URL that you will use for a feed from UW-Madison News to display on your page, using the steps above.