Add Feedburner to Expression Engine

This is how I incorporated Feedburner with Expression Engine. I feel very confident in using Feedburner as my main feed distributor due to their growth in popularity and they keeping adding new great features like subscribe by email. I don't see Feedburner going under anytime soon.

Ok, let's get dirty and dive into how to set up your feed in your EE powered site. Here are the easy steps to follow.

1) The default RSS template that comes with EE is not formatted well for text breaks and the images when viewed in the feed reader. You will have to adjust the codes to display properly in any feed reader. To help with this matter, I found a great article by Sue Crock from EEHowto.com where she revised the codes so that the text have the proper breaks and the images display properly in the feed reader. Go visit her site to copy the codes.

2) Create a new rss template in EE CP. I titled my template rss_2.0 because the codes are based on RSS 2.0 but you can ultimately title it whatever you like. Also, make sure the template you create is set to RSS page in the "Template Type" pull down menu options. Then copy the code from EEHowto.com in your blank template you just created.

3) Now, let's tweek Sue's codes to meet your needs. Find this code in the beginning of the codes.

Since I only want the Journal ("journal" weblog) and the News ("news" weblog) sections to be fed, I changed the code to: Update the temple.

4) In your head area of your XHTML file, add:

Of course, you would have to change "my_template_group" to your group name. I placed this code below the stylesheet link. Update your template.

5) Then go to Feedburner's website. Type in your website's url starting with http:// and submit. You will be asked to register and just simply follow the very easy instructions.

6) Once you obtain the feed address from Feedburner, go back to you head area of your template and change the code from

to


Of course, you have to replace "id_given_by_feedburner" with whatever ID you got from Feedburner. Most likely your ID will be same as the name of your page title.

7) Lastly, hyperlink all the feed links or feed banner to http://feeds.feedburner.com/id_given_by_feedburner on your website pages. That's it, Feedburner will do the rest!

Once the user clicks on your hyperlink to subscribe to your feed, they will get prompted to this page (see below). Look at all the feed readers it supports! Also, Feedburner makes your site compatible to Atom based readers as well. It is a free service for 1 feed link and has a basic stat to see how many people are subscribing to your feed. For multiple feed links, you would have pay a monthly fee and you have access to much more advanced statistical information. As for me, I am a simpleton. I am pretty happy with the basic set-up I have and will consider to upgrade in the future if I have a reason to upgrade. Happy feeding!