By Dave Ingalls
Digital Marketing Consultant
February 21, 2010
Every now and then I get the opportunity to solve a Web site-related technical problem. When that happens, I proudly don my “geek hat”, go under the hood and outline how I was able to solve that problem. This time it has to do with WordPress and its use as a Web site and blog Content Management System (CMS). I am doing this because I’ve seen several posts in forums wondering how to solve this particular problem.
WordPress is the first or second most popular open source blogging software on the Web. Recent WordPress versions have added the ability to use the software as either a stand-alone blogging platform or as the back-end content management system for a Web site and a blog.
As part of the Web site/blog setup, WordPress provides a built-in mechanism to create a “static” Home page for the Web site and a separate “static” page that is used as the blog home page. (I put the word static in quotes because there are really no static Web pages in WordPress – all pages and posts are created dynamically from content and graphics stored in an online database.)
Using this built-in mechanism is very straightforward – you end up with a Web site “home” page that mimics the standard “index” Web site home page and a blog “home” page that most folks name “blog”. So far, so good.
Now, if you also structured this WordPress-based Web site so that all of the WordPress files are installed in their own sub-directory, you end up with the problem described below.
The problem: The BLOG RSS feed has an incorrect name (title) and the link to the blog “home” page is also incorrect. (If you don’t know what a RSS feed is, please visit Wikipedia to learn about it.)
An example of what I’m talking about will be helpful.
Let’s say we named our WordPress-based Web site the “Internet Marketing Course”, and we named the related blog the “Internet Marketing Course Blog”. (Sound familiar?!) When we look at the standard RSS feed created by WordPress based on the configuration described above, the BLOG RSS feed is named “Internet Marketing Course” and the Web page address it links back to is the home page of the Web site, not the blog. Oh oh!
The fix: Long story short, open the WordPress files “feed-rss.php” and “feed-rss2.php” in a text editor like Notepad. (Both files are located in “wp-includes” directory in the WordPress installation directory.) Then make the following changes to both files:
1. Add “echo ‘ Blog’;” in the location shown below to add the word “Blog” to the feed title:
<title><?php bloginfo_rss(‘name’); echo ‘ Blog’; wp_title_rss(); ?></title>
Note the SPACE inside the single quotation marks.
2. Remove all text between the <link> tags and then place the specific blog home page address (URL)
<link>http://www.yourdomain.com/blog</link>
If you’ve also had this problem, I hope this blog post helps!