General Settings

Once you install the free core WP RSS Aggregator plugin, you will have a list of general settings that will apply to all sources and imported items, unless overridden by a source's individual options. These can be set by navigating to the  RSS Aggregator > Settings section from the admin menu.

General

Limit items by age

This is the maximum amount of time that feed items are allowed to stay stored on your site. Once this limit has been exceeded, older feed items will be permanently deleted from your site to comply with the limit. Feed items already imported before setting this option will be deleted if they eventually exceed this age limit. Also, items in the RSS feed that are already older than this age will not be imported at all.

Leave this box empty if you don’t want to set a limit.

Limit feed items stored per feed

This is the maximum number of imported items to keep stored for each individual feed source. Any feed source that has its own limit set will see that limit override this one.

When new items are imported and the limit for a feed source is exceeded, the oldest feed items for that feed source will be permanently deleted to make room for the new ones. If you already have feed items imported from a feed source, setting this option later may delete some of your already imported feed items in order to comply with the new limit.

Leave this box empty if you don’t want to set a limit.

Limit feed items per import

This option refers to the maximum amount of feed items to import per fetch, for each individual feed source.

The frequency of updates (how often the plugin fetches new feed items) is still determined by the feed processing interval.

Import order

This is the order in which the feed items for every feed source will be imported.

• Select “Any” if the order is not significant, say if you want all new feed items to be imported either way.
• Select “Latest First” to import the most recent feed items first.
• Select “Oldest first” to import the oldest feed items first.

So, if out of those 8 feed items, 2 have a published date of Monday 1st April, 3 have a published date of Tuesday 2nd April, and 3 have a published date of Wednesday 3rd April, the plugin will only import the oldest 5, which are the 2 from Monday 1st April and the 3 from Tuesday 2nd April.  

This setting is very useful when used with the Limit feed items per import option above.

Feed processing interval

This option determines how frequently the feed sources (that do not have their own up date interval) should check for updates and fetch new feed items accordingly.

It is recommended to not have more than 20 feed sources that use this global update interval. Having too many feed sources updating precisely at the same time can cause the  WP Cron System to crash. You can learn how to stagger the imports for different feed sources by referring to this knowledge base guide.

Unique titles only

This option allows you to choose whether to allow multiple feed items to have the same title. When enabled, if a feed item has the same name as a previously imported feed item, it will not be imported.

This can be useful in cases where permalinks change, or where multiple permalinks refer to the same title (from one or more feed sources). When ticking this box from within the general plugin settings, it will apply to ALL feed sources.

Custom Feed

Custom feed URL

This will be the URL of the custom feed created by WP RSS Aggregator.

WP RSS Aggregator allows you to create a custom RSS feed that contains ALL of the items imported through the plugin. This setting allows you to change the URL of the custom feed to anything of your choice. This feed can then be used anywhere else as a normal RSS feed.

Custom feed title

The title of the custom feed mentioned above. This title will be included in the RSS source of the custom feed, in a <title> tag.

Custom feed limit

The maximum number of feed items to include in the custom feed mentioned above. The feed will always include the most recent feed items and leave out any of the older ones that do not fit within the limit.

Advanced Settings

Certificate Path

This path to the file containing one or more certificates. These will be used to certify certificates over secure connection, such as when fetching a remote resource over HTTPS. The default is the path to the certificate file bundled with WordPress.

Feed Request User Agent

This option lets you change the User Agent string that is used by WP RSS Aggregator.

If you see an error similar to “ Failed to fetch feed “http://www.example.com/rss”. The resource could not be retrieved ...” in the error log, it's likely that the RSS feed web-server rejected WP RSS Aggregator's request to fetch the feed.

Sometimes, a web-server may be set up to not accept requests from software that is not a web-browser. This is often an oversight from the web-server's end, since RSS feeds are not intended to be read by a web-browser, but rather by an RSS reader. Web servers can identify what kind of software is requesting the RSS Feed through a piece of text that is called a  User Agent string.

We've seen multiple such cases in the past, which have typically been resolved by the offending web-server. However, to avoid this issue altogether, WP RSS Aggregator uses a browser-like User Agent by default. This will play nicely with 99% of web-servers on the web, so you should have no reason to change it.

This setting may be removed in a future update.