J.B.Slife dot Com

Yesterdays post was about using RSS feeds to help start a forum. I said I would post a nice little “how to” on RSS feeds in vBulletin. Yes, I know I’m running a little late as it now after midnight. I ran into a couple of issues today that needed to be sorted out first. Enough of me, here we go.

1. Add the forum(s) where the feed(s) will go

This is very simple and very important. Remember, you never want to claim somebody elses content as your own. Make sure this area clearly states that the content is syndicated. You can see I have mine titled “Syndicated Country”.

Log into your vBulletin administration and go to:

Forums & Moderators > Add New Forum

Here you can create any new forums that you would like to display the RSS feeds. This is very straight forward and most users can figure this part out. If you need a little extra help, check out the vBulletin documention.

2. Add a user that will post the feeds

The feeds must be posted by a user. I like to make a specific user to add all of the RSS content. On my country forum I have chosen to call the user “CountryNEWS”. To add a user to your forum go to:

Users > Add New User

Once again, very easy and straight forward. If you need help see this doc. Now that you have your forum to hold the RSS content and a user to post it, your ready to go.

3. Add the RSS feeds

This part is also very simple, but many people don’t know that you can do it. Go to:

RSS Feeds > Add New RSS Feed

The top fields on the “Add New RSS Feed” page are the important ones.

1. Feed Is Enabled: Yes (obviously)
2. Title: Just type in the title of the feed or something that will describe it to you.
3. URL of Feed: Enter the URL of the feed (ex. http://feeds.feedburner.com/jbslifecom)
4. Check Feed Every…: This is how often vBulletin will import new items from the feed. The options from every 10 minutes to every 12 hours. If you are adding a feed that only adds one new item per day, don’t set it to every 10 minutes. I have most of mine set to every 6 or 12 hours.
5. Maximum Items to Fetch: This limits the amount of items to import from the feed. Set this to 0 (zero) to import the whole feed.
6. Search Items for Words: This helps you pull in more relevant items. Just add some keywords and it will only import items with at least one of your keywords. I don’t use this feature as I try to find highly relevant feed in the first place.
7. User Name: Type the user of the person that will post the news. The user you created from step #2 of this post.
8. Forum: This is a drop down list of your forums. This is the forum that the RSS feed will be displayed in. Pick the one that you created in step one.
9. Allow Smilies: I always set this to no.
10. Display Signature: I set this to no also.
11. Convert HTML to BB code: Yes is a better bet for this one. It keeps everything a little cleaner and safer.

That’s it…very simple. I really wanted to add this to show off this vBulletin feature. Importing RSS feeds is a newer feature of vBulletin that many people don’t know about. If you have any problems, just let me know.

Later,

JBSlife