If you are Looking for a better way to give your Readers a Great Feed from your Joomla based website, here is how to do it!

But first, let me shortly explain what is wrong with the standard Joomla Syndication component.. yes, the syndication because that is what composes the feed.
Many people mistakenly believe it is the Feed component, but that brings in Feeds from other websites or Blogs.

The basic Syndication of Joomla strips all HTML coding and just delivers plain text.. so your carefully crafted page with nice images and Bold Text paragraphs gets strip off all what made to page so nice to read and look at ...

Besides that, you just get a feed from your Frontpage only :-(

So you just make a short intro for the page and that gets in your Feed, but you want full articles for your readers! Don't You?
Your RSS Readers will love you for it!

So what is the Solution?

Use the Joomla DS Syndication RSS Feed component

The DS Syndication component can is Created by Martin Diphoorn from www.joomlafun.com and can be downloaded from http://joomlacode.org/gf/project/dssyndicate/

The DS Syndication component lets you create a Feed from any categorie you want, even if you need to combine several categories into one Feed !
And you can choose if you want Images in the feed or not... you should put the images in there, in my opinion...

There is a Component Download and a Module to show the feeds you created
Download both, although I don't use the module, but I will explain that later on.

Installing the Component

Installation works like any other Joomla component:

• Go into the administrator panel
• Choose installation of a component
• Browse to the downloaded component file and get is installed!
• So far its like a normal Component, but now you need to take a Next step!
• Go to the component menu en choose the component install option!

If you run a previous version of the component, you need to run a separate SQL statement in you MySQL environment..

I found it easier to remove the component with the de-installation option and then do the Install like a new setup.

It is important that you take the Installation step to create the MySQL tables needed for the RSS Feeds to work!

Creating the RSS Feed from Joomla

Go to the Feeds option of the component menu and choose New

Now give your Feed a name: Like WordPress Information by Hummerbie

Next you can describe the Feed in the field below the name

Now after this, it is up to your how to configure the Options... I will show you my choices and tell you why you might use the same ones.

1. Choose RSS 2.0 because that is the standard for RSS Readers now, like the Google reader.
2. Number of items in the feed.. it depends on how large your articles in the feed are going to be, if you just Blog and do short items you could take this up to 12.
   If you always do very long articles, you might consider 5
3. Most of the Options after these you can leave as they are, or select the item you want to strip from the feed (be sure to have a valid point to do this...)
4. In the field categories, you can put in the names of the categories you want to put into the Feed.
   Copy these names from your categorie fields, Please be aware, this it the Name field, not the Title!
   Separate the name by a , so you get something like "WordPress SEO, WordPress Manual,WordPress Plugins" and so on.
   If you just want the Frontpage, leave this Blanc.
5. Include Categories into the Title, please set this to No, otherwise you get weird long feed titles, as the categorie names are attached to the Title..
6. If you want to you can specify separate images to show on each feed.

Creating the Feed images and how to use the ping function, is written in (to come)

Once you save the Feed, you can check if everything functions as expected by clicking the URL in the feed-manager (I prefer to Richt Click and the Option 'show in a different window')

You can always create a lot of new feeds with different categories if you want, just got through the process the same way as before.

If the Feed show up right for you, its time to take the next step..Running your Feed through Feedburner