I've seen that many vb admins are frustrated with the way external.php handles your RSS feeds. The point of frustration is that their entire post, content is published externally thus eliminating the need for readers to visit their cherished websites.
I've gone thru the same pain and here is an easy way, no coding, no modication of templates.
Step 1. Do yourself a favor and set your RSS URL on http://www.feedburner.com. It is a great RSS machine and it is part of Google. You can enter as many feeds as you like. Vbulletin uses external.php file for RSS output.
Step 2. Enable External Data Provider via Admin CP > Vbulletin Options.
Step 3. Once you've done with the setup of your URL, on the FeedBurner to Tab called "Optimize". I attach a screenshot from my account. It should look like this:
Step 4. Down below, you will see a menu called "Summary Burner". This is our magic box.
Step 5. Go there and configure as many characters per feed item as you wish. This will essentially trim your content. Play with it until you are satisfied and all the work must be done. Voila!
My feeds are now set up on FeedBurner and crawled by Google, too. .
This works, but it is so damn frustrating that vBulletin doesn't do something about this "entire content" RSS issue. They really seem to be focusing on crap that most people don't care about and letting third parties fix the crap that they are too lazy to fix. Regardless, thanks for the article.
certainly, it would be great to have Max. Characters in RSS feed as part of vbulletin itself - no doubt about it! Giving away your content just like that should be a concern. Google (FeedBurner) appeared to be one step ahead. As long as it works, I am using this simple solution.
This works, but it is so damn frustrating that vBulletin doesn't do something about this "entire content" RSS issue. They really seem to be focusing on crap that most people don't care about and letting third parties fix the crap that they are too lazy to fix. Regardless, thanks for the article.
Lazy? They simply are not following standards and have no vision about how customers are using their products and take no effort to take other people's excellent ideas and modifications to work them into future products. I'm not sure why Jelsoft has not taken the opportunity to partnership and leap frog itself into the next generation of product. It's like IBM OS2 Warp dying a slow death.
You still get the standard vb feeds if you get the feed url while visiting your site (the rss icon in the web browser)... So how would a user even use the feedburner feed? Or am I missing something here?
Just found this looking for a way to manage feed output. Finding it strange vb put such a lack of options in this feature.
that's absolutely correct. While max. words or characters output is not configurable within the the product itself there are some workarounds posted on vb.org and elsewhere. From what I've seen you have to change external.php - I do not want to change vb's vanilla code .
Feedburner gives a variety of tools for managing RSS feeds off your site as well as third-party ones. I use it for more than just trimming vbulletin posts.
as far as disabling direct access to /forum/external.php, I believe, .htaccess can take of the things. configuration:
<Files external.php>
order allow,deny
deny from all
allow from 66.150.96
</Files>
06-13-2008, 10:00 PM
06-16-2008, 03:33 PM
