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

[Brandon Sheley]

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

[pooffck1]

Originally Posted by Loco.M

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

what does feedburner do?

my forum is limited to guests (so they cant see anything) and i cant get any rss feeds. How do i fix this?

[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.

[KW802]

Originally Posted by Loco.M

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

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.

[Coop1979]

Thank you for the feedback and for a catching a couple of inconsistencies. I believe I have corrected them all now. I also clarified step 8 a little more.

This mod is more for the "advanced" forum operator who wants more control over their RSS feeds and wants to do things like publicize and monetize their RSS feeds.

[iogames]

Ok, I get my account with FeedBurner.com but before to proceed to the integration, is this the final version? no more Modifications?
give me a green light and I will proceed

[Coop1979]

It's final - no additional modifications.

Go for it!

[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?

[mmoore5553]

does this work ?