Dharmarketing

Quick: Skip the yammering and take me to the the how-to!

So I’ll admit it, I’m a former SiteBuildIt (SBI) customer. I’m still a great fan and an affiliate. I migrated to WordPress for my own sites primarily because it’s much cheaper ($299 a year for SBI versus free for WP, not counting hosting, time, and whatever other tools you end up buying), but also because I wanted to learn the nitty-gritty of how to build a web site.

Little did I know it would take me about 3 years to learn how to do with WordPress just about everything SBI could do at the click of a mouse…

…including putting your static pages into a RSS feed. Today I spill the beans.

Aside: The cool part about “wasting” all that time is that people now pay me hourly to make their WordPress blogs do pretty much what an SBI site does out-of-the-box. (First they want a blog to help with their SEO. Then they want to un-blog their blog so it looks like a site but runs on a blog platform, in other words, use WP as a content management system. Hello, that’s SBI, only SBI also takes care of the hosting and the SEO, making sure you build your site right the first time instead of having to hire someone like me to come back and rewrite content and re-engineer the behind-the-curtain Wizard of Oz stuff for you. Anyway…)

If this is sounding like a SBI testimonial, don’t be confused: It is an SBI testimonial up to this point. The part of me that loves simplicity loves SBI. Now then, let’s talk WordPress.

The true destroy-it-yourselfer in me loves WordPress, because I like to know how things work, and I like to be in total control. So what if I have issues.

Now that I’m somewhat familiar with WordPress, having written a plugin and altered several others, created a few themes, and learned a little about things like html, css, php, mysql, ajax, perl — stuff I was blissfully ignorant of a couple of years back — there are really only two features I still miss from SBI.

The two features I miss are (1) the Brainstorm It! keyword tool (I now use Chris Lee’s Keywords Analyzer which is great but not quite the same), and (2) that SBI adds all its pages to a site feed, not just the posts from its included blog feature.

WP, on the other hand, includes posts in its feeds, but not static pages. From a blogging purist’s point of view, this makes total sense. But if you’re like me and don’t really give a whit about blogging per se and just want traffic, making all of your content available for syndication makes even more sense.

Enough jibber-jabber.

How to add WordPress pages to a feed

1. The essential piece of this puzzle is Antone Roundy’s Grouper Evolution. There is a free version of Grouper available, but you will need the paid version to carry out what we’re going to do. A single-user license is $24.97 and worth every penny.

While you’re at Antone’s site, get CaRP Evolution, allowing you to display feeds on any of your sites in search-engine readable HTML instead of javascript. Again, there is a free version, but you will need the paid version if you want to create a mash-up of your WordPress static pages rss feed with your regular WordPress feed, creating a feed with both.

2. Now, about your WP blog. It’s going to take some work to create a page somewhere on your site that not only lists your pages, but also excerpts some information from those pages. Page excerpts or descriptions don’t exist by default. Depending on how you’re set up, multiple loops may be just what the doctor ordered to get the job done. There’s also this thread on the WP forum that offers a solution.

You want to end up with something like this on your page:

• A Page A description or content from A Page.
• Another Page A description or content from Another Page.
• A Child Page A description or content from A Child Page of Another Page.
• Another Child Page A description or content from Another Child Page of Another Page.
• A Post A description or content from A Post.
• Another Post A description or content from Another Post.

Nested lists will also work fine with this example.

Really, the sky is the limit as to how you set this up, so long as you understand something about regular expression (regex). If regex isn’t your forte, stick to what I’m spoon-”feeding” you.

3. Install Grouper Evolution as per the documentation.

4. Create a new php page for your feed. Giving it a name like grouperfeed.php or something similar will make it easily distinguishable from the WP feeds. Save it to your WP installation’s root directory.

5. Save the following code in grouperfeed.php:

BUMMER. WordPress isn’t outputting the code correctly in this post. It’s getting garbled.

I wrote this post without intending to tease you. But it just isn’t working. So I’ve put the code in my autoresponder. Sign up in the sidebar for my newsletter and you’ll get the code immediately. You can cancel whenever you want.

The file has line-by-line explanations of what the code is doing.

Two drawbacks: Your channel title and description will not be displayed, and your posts will not show up newest-posts-first in your feed. Think twice before replacing your main feed with this Grouper-generated feed. But you can use it as an auxiliary to syndicate your pages, certainly submitting it to pingoat, technorati, and feedburner among the many possibilities.

See the Grouper Evolution site for more details on what you can do with this wonderful tool. Sorry, due to the complicated nature of regex, no support is offered for getting this running on your site.