Integration with vBulletin - Integrate Feedburner RSS tools - replace the standard RSS feeds

This mod has been carried over from the 3.6.x branch with the permission of the original author, mccollin.

I am frustrated with the fact that vBulletin 3.6.x does not limit the RSS feeds and so your entire posts are going out for someone to load into their site, thus eliminating the need for them to come to your site at all. Upon investigating this, I discovered FeedBurner's vast capabilities so I have tried to replace the built-in RSS capabilities of vBulletin's external.php with FeedBurner.

The modification is a simple template change, and renaming one file.

1. First you need to go to feedburner.com and get yourself an account setup.

2. Copy your /forums/external.php file to some other name such as /forums/feedburner.php. (you will eventually want to hide external.php, so this is a preliminary step)

3. Next go into AdminCP and print out a list of all your forums. Then, by using the "hover" over the names of the forums, record the forum IDs from the URL in the browser's status window on your list.

4. Create a new feed at feedburner.com using the url of

PHP Code:

http://yourforumurl.com/yourforumdirectory/feedburner.php?type=RSS2 


(where /yourforumurl.com/yourforumdirectory/ is the path to your forum, and feedburner.php is what you copied external.php to).

5. Using the tools at Feedburner.com to create links to your feed, determine the url to your Feedburner feed and make a note of it. It will most likely be something like this...

PHP Code:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/yourforumurlcom 


6. Test the feed to make sure it works.

7. Now you will need to manually create a new feed for any forum which you want to have a feed fore. Go into Feedburner.com and the new feed dialog. Re-enter the url used above to create another feed, and append to the end of it the code for forumid. Use the chart you created and start at the top. You will need to create a feed for each forum you wish to have a feed to. The url for forum ID 47 would be

PHP Code:

http://yourforumurl.com/yourforumdirectory/feedburner.php?type=RSS2&forumid=47 


Feedburner should create the title of the feed for you based on your forum title, and I recommend you don't change it here. The reason is that if you have a lot of forums, you will have a lot of feeds and your only easy way to identify them is by their names. You want them to match. Another tip is that for parent forums, I used the feature of external.php to aggregate forumids with commas. In these cases, I would list all the child forums into one feed.

8. Repeat this process for all forums you wish to have feeds for, making sure that the url used in each case is exactly the same except for the forumid. This is very important. For example, if your feed url provided in Step 5 by FeedBurner is http://feeds.feedburner.com/yourforumurlcom, then the url used when creating each subsequent forum feed needs to be http://feeds.feedburner.com/yourforumurlcom-xx (xx being the forum id).

9. Now to integrate this into your forum, you need to make a change to the headinclude template. Find the following code:

PHP Code:

<if condition="$vboptions['externalrss']">
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="$vboptions[bbtitle] RSS Feed" href="external.php?type=RSS2" />
<if condition="$show['foruminfo'] OR $show['threadinfo']">
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="$vboptions[bbtitle] - $foruminfo[title_clean] - RSS Feed" 

href="external.php?type=RSS2&amp;forumids=$foruminfo[forumid]" />
</if> 


And replace it with the following code, replacing the urls with the ones that feedburner created for your feeds. Note that you replace the forumid part of the url with $foruminfo[forumid].

PHP Code:

<if condition="$vboptions['externalrss']">
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="$vboptions[bbtitle] RSS Feed" 

href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/yourforumurlcom" />
<if condition="$show['foruminfo'] OR $show['threadinfo']">
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="$vboptions[bbtitle] - $foruminfo[title_clean] - RSS Feed" 

href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/yourforumurlcom-$foruminfo[forumid]" />
</if> 


10. Once you are sure that its working, you can rename external.php to something else. If you ever want to reverse this, you simply need to replace your old template, and rename external.php back.

There are literally hundreds of things you can do with your RSS feeds once they are being provided by FeedBurner. Here is a good article to start with:

How and Why to Use Feedburner

[vb_mp]

I find the explanation of integrating a group of forums into one feed lacking in both the 3.6 version and this one.

Can you please explain what you mean when you say you can link external.php?type=RSS2&forumid=33,44,46,37 to just one feed since your replacement code for the template obviously takes just one forumid (not a comma separated list)

Thanks

[ahmedzbeda]

installed and uninstalled immediatly ..

cause :

i am sharing my content with a site that have higher page rank than mine .. so my content are added "untrimed" with good backlinks pointing back to my site as deep links ..

using feedburner .. will give pagerank from those links in profit to feed burner as links to threads that appear in threads are pointing to the feed burner website not to mine ..

for my self .. i just changed my rss original feed name " hiding it " and only giving its path to my friendly site wich we collaborate togheter ..

thanks ..

[SBlueman]

What would I need to do if I wanted to have a separate feed for each forum in the edit for the site's headerinclude template?

[webmastersun]

Seem the author left the thread without any responses.

I have just applied for my forum vb4 and it works as well.

Originally Posted by Brandon Sheley

demo?
I don't really understand, I have feedburner on my forums already

If you registered with feedburner, go there and add any sub forums to it and start using from step 7 as the guide above
Demo? you can have a look on my forum http://www.webmastersun.com, click on rss icon you can understand how it works.

Originally Posted by Casparian

I think you need to rewrite your instructions from Step 7.

I see what you're trying to do, but it's not very clear.

For example, one of your code examples mentions fbget.php but you previously named the script feedburner.php.

You also didn't mention when creating the second (and subsequent) feeds on feedburner for the individual forums what they should be named. From the example you give, http://feeds.feedburner.com/yourforumurlcom-$foruminfo[forumid], obviously they need to be yourforumurlcom-xx ?

I like the idea, I wish it was a bit simpler, my forum has about 40 forums within it. It'd be nice if there was an easy way to get all the IDs, mabe a simpe script which outputs a list of all of them which are in use.

Right, you need create urls in feedburner correstpond to forum id on your forum to make urls works when it gets auto links from your forum.

Originally Posted by KW802

Looks like he's just trying to replace the standard RSS 'auto-discovery' links with FeedBurner links instead.

EG: In FireFox, if you click on the RSS button in the URL bar it will 'find' the stock vBulletin external.php script but his change will instead 'find' your FeedBurner URL instead.

In short, you're hiding the default vB script and are using FeedBurner instead for all of your outgoing feeds that people can subscribe to.

I agree with you but I won't use this way because we have to create all urls according to feedburner and some can be broken if we miss them.

Originally Posted by AzzidReign

I don't understand why you have to change it from external.php to feedburner.php. It looks like you are replacing the links in the style anyway, right?

Some SEO guys think that it's better for on-page SEO if we use feedburner on our sites/blogs. For me, just added it yesterday and I need a little time to see it effective or not.

Originally Posted by SBlueman

What would I need to do if I wanted to have a separate feed for each forum in the edit for the site's headerinclude template?

You go feedburner and create urls like this feeds.feedburner.com/yourforumcom/yoursubforum

for example I created
http://www.webmastersun.com/external...S2&forumids=95

But I stopped from step 9 of the author and using redirection for better purposes.

the link above will be redirected to feedburner

http://feeds.feedburner.com/webmastersun/webhosting

Hope that helps!