How to Set Up Feed to Post's General Feed Source Settings

Each feed source needs to have a few general settings set. They let the plugin know what to do with the incoming posts. The default settings are the most commonly used, so in most cases, you can leave them as they are. However, modifying these settings gives you a lot of flexibility.

NOTE: Most of the below options are the same as those set in the Feed to Post's global settings under RSS Aggregator > Settings. The options selected in the individual feed source (as seen below) will override any of the general settings.

Here’s the meta box you will see:

Most of the options are self-explanatory, however, let us take a look at them one by one.

Post to Site (for multisite websites only)

If you have the plugin installed on a multisite version of WordPress, this option will be visible. You can select which sub-site the newly imported content should be posted.

Post Type

Feed to Post will:

  1. Detect all the post types (including the WP defaults ‘post’ and ‘page’) set on your site,
  2. Provide these post types for you within the drop-down.

Incoming feed items can be stored in any of these post types. If you want to create a specific post type to store your feed items in, the Custom Post Type UI plugin makes it very easy for you to do so.

Post Status

If you want to auto-publish content without your intervention, you can set the post status to ‘Published’.

If you are using the plugin to curate content, it would be a better idea to set the Post Status to ‘Draft’. Reasons why you may want to set it to Draft:

  1. This gives you more control before publishing Posts
  2. You can go through all the imported feed items and edit their content, as well as choose which ones you want to publish and which others you want to trash
  3. You can also choose from the other WP default statuses ‘Pending Review’ and ‘Private’, (Private status can be used for Membership sites where users must log in before viewing content)

Post Format

Post Formats were introduced in WordPress 3.1. A Post Format is a piece of meta-information that can be used by a theme to customize its presentation of a post. The Post Formats feature:

  1. Provides a standardized list of formats that are available to all themes that support the feature.
  2. Themes are not required to support every format on the list.
  3. New formats cannot be introduced by themes or even plugins.
  4. Within Feed to Post, you can select any of the standard post formats that you’d like to give to your newly imported feed items.

Post Date

Using Feed to Post, importing feed items from other websites would show posts created at earlier dates. With this option, you can

  1. Choose whether to keep their original date
  2. Set the date to the one at the time when the import takes place. Unless you have a specific need to change this option, it’s a good idea to keep it at its default ‘Original post date’ setting.

Enable Comments

By default, comments are not allowed on imported feed items, but you may enable the comments form at the bottom of your posts.

Force Full Content

This option is available when using the Full-Text RSS Feeds add-on alongside Feed to Post.

Since some feed sources only provide an excerpt of the full post published on the site. By activating this setting, the plugin will attempt to go around this by attempting to read the original post directly rather than import the feed item from the provided RSS feed. 

Enabling this option will increase the feed processing time, so use it only when needed.

Please note that the Force Full Content does not always work due to technological limitations. Click here to learn more about using Full-Text RSS Feeds with Feed to Post.

Import Post Excerpt

By default, Feed to Post does not populate the excerpt field for the imported posts. By enabling this option, it will search for the feed item's short description and set it as the excerpt for the imported post. 

All HTML tags are stripped for the excerpt.

NOTE: When using the premium full-text service (checking the "Force full content" option), the full-text script sets the entire post content as the excerpt. This is undesired in most cases, so we advise leaving the "Import Post Excerpt" option unchecked in such a situation (until we release the feature for it ourselves). 

Alternatively, you may use the Word Trimming option to "Generate an excerpt" in order to create a post excerpt from the full content.

Allow Embedded Content

With this option enabled WP RSS Aggregator will also import iframe, embed, and object content found in posts. This option should be enabled if the content you plan to import contains things like videos from YouTube or Vimeo.

Use GUIDs

The use GUIDs option sets the plugin to uniquely identify feed items using the feed item GUID as opposed to the permalink. This option applies to RSS feeds that use the same permalink and have a GUID value.

Canonical Link

Check this box to add a rel="canonical” link to the head of imported posts. Read our in-depth guide to "rel=canonical".

Still need help? Contact Us Contact Us