WordPress has the ability to add custom fields to any post, these fields allow you to store extra data about the post without it having to go into the content.

But custom fields won’t appear in your RSS feed because this will only display your content, so you could miss important information for your RSS readers.

Here is a WordPress snippet to add to your functions.php file to display custom fields in your RSS feed.

function fields_in_feed($content) {
if(is_feed()) {
$post_id = get_the_ID();
$output = ‘

‘;
$content = $content.$output;
}
return $content;
}
add_filter(‘the_content’,’fields_in_feed’);

Learn more about custom fields in your RSS Feed.

Add Post Featured Images To RSS Feed

One thing about your RSS feed is that the user will not get to your information from your website, so if you have a post image thumbnail they will not see it from your RSS feed unless it is added to your post. So we can take the RSS hooks we learnt in the previous post and use this to add your post image thumbnail to the post.

Below is the code snippet which will get the current post id and then get the post image thumbnail for this current post and then uses the_excerpt_rss and the_content_rss hooks to add this into the RSS feed.

function rss_post_thumbnail($content) {
global $post;
if(has_post_thumbnail($post->ID)) {
$content = ‘
‘ . get_the_post_thumbnail($post->ID) .
‘
‘ . get_the_content();
}
return $content;
}
add_filter(‘the_excerpt_rss’, ‘rss_post_thumbnail’);
add_filter(‘the_content_feed’, ‘rss_post_thumbnail’);

Learn more about adding featured images to RSS feed.

Add Feed Only Content

With WordPress you can use a shortcode in your normal posts for RSS only content, below is a WordPress snippet to use for this functionality.

Add the following into your functions.php file to create the shortcode.
function rssonly_content( $atts, $content = null) {
if (!is_feed()) return “”;
return $content;
}
add_shortcode(‘rssonly’, ‘rssonly_content’);

Now we can use this in the content of your posts, at the end of your posts put the following shortcode.

[rssonly]Thanks for reading this RSS post, please visit http://www.paulund.co.uk to view more useful snippets.[/rssonly]

When this post is published on your blog you won’t see this content but if you go to your RSS reader you will see this content at the end of the post.

Learn how to create a RSS feed only shortcode.

Exclude Categories From RSS Feed

Below is a snippet you need to add to your functions.php page which will run before the get posts method. It will check to see if the request is from the RSS feed if so then it will exclude a category from your RSS feed.

// Custom Feed Query
function customFeedquery($query) {
$categoryId = 1; // Change ID to the excluded ID
if(is_feed()) {
$query->set(‘cat’,’-’.$categoryId);
return $query;
}
}
add_filter(‘pre_get_posts’, ‘customFeedquery’);

Learn more about excluding categories from the RSS Feed.

Disable Your RSS Feed

I know this is a strange one to include in a list of useful snippets you can use on your RSS Feed, but some people may want to completely disable the RSS Feed on their WordPress blog. For this situation you can use the following snippet.