How To Build A Planet On WordPress

Posted on November 15, 2007
Filed Under WordPress Business, WordPress Syndication |

Don’t build a blog, build a planet!

A planet is a web content aggregator site that collects latest contents from different blogs having the same interest. Usually, these planet websites collect news from RSS feeds of very popular and renowned blogs and display their contents in a single page. So if you browse a planet. If you are not familiar with planet web site, take a look of the following planets to get a taste:

Planet PHP http://planet-php.org
Planet MySQL http://www.planetmysql.org
Planet Ruby http://planetruby.0×42.net/
Planet PostgreSQL http://www.planetpostgresql.org/

Now you get the idea, so you can build your own planet. The better news is, you don’t have to do so much, really. No wonder, a few plugins available will help you out. One of them is called FeedWordPress. As descriped by its developer, FeedWordPress is an Atom/RSS aggregator for the WordPress weblog software. It syndicates content from newsfeeds that you choose into your WordPress webblog; if you syndicate several newsfeeds then you can use WordPress’s posts database and templating engine as the back-end of an aggregation (”planet”) website.

Setup FeedWordPress is simple. After downloading and extracting the archive, you will find a folder named wp-content folder. Inside this folder you will see 2 files, update-feeds.php and feedwordpress.php. All you nee to do is to put them inside WordPress directory as per the following directions:
- Put feedwordpress.php inside the plugins folder (/wp-content/plugins)
- Put update-feeds.php inside the content folder (/wp-content)

Next, go to admin to activate this plug-in, that adds an additional sub-menu Syndication under the Options menu. There you’ll find a lot of options and features for aggregating posts from different blogs and display their contents at your site.

As you see, FeedWordPress plug-in is extremely useful for feed syndication, especially if you want to turn your WordPress blog into a planet. But it is not the only one. Other feed syndicaiton plugins, such as SmartRss also does a great job. You can find a list of more feed syndication available plug-ins at the following URL:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Plugins/Syndication

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