An Introduction to Full Text RSS Feeds

When subscribing to sites, a feed reader will typically pull in whatever content is in the feed provided by the source site. That being said, some sites provide either partial feeds or full ones. 

The partial feeds:

• provide an excerpt
• prompt you to click on the 'Read more' link
• lead you to the source site for the full entry

Using Feed to Post, you can pull in the article content and provide it on your own site as a Post. However, it won’t look complete if only partial content is provided by the feed source.

Force Full Content

Using Feed to Post along with the Force Full Content option solves this problem and gets full feeds for all your feed sources, whether or not they offer only partial feeds.

When using the Full-Text RSS Feeds add-on, you will be able to pull in the partial feeds as normal first, and then get the full articles as well. The add-on will then build a full feed from the articles before presenting you with the final full feed of article content.

How It Works

If you have just the Feed to Post add-on running, WP RSS Aggregator will fetch only the items provided by the feed source. The content displayed as part of the excerpt of the converted post will be derived from the <description> tags. If the <description> tag is not available, the <content> tags will be taken into consideration.

However, many feed sources choose to provide only a limited amount of content, prompting users to click on a 'Read More' link to get the full content. With our Full-Text RSS add-on running, our code will visit the link provided in each item and try to ascertain the content you desire to display on your site. Since web pages across the internet are not built according to a set pattern of HTML tags, the Full-Text RSS add-on does not always succeed in guessing the content you wish to display.

Please remember, that you should use the Feed to Post add-on only if the source site permits you to re-publish the full content on your site with explicit acknowledgment of the original source.

The Feed to Post add-on includes two features to help you ensure you are not violating copyright laws while curating content from other sources:

1. A field in the general settings under RSS Aggregator > Settings > Feed to Post to set the Source Link Text. More details are in this knowledge base article.
2. A checkbox to ensure the canonical link tag points to the original source of the imported post. Refer to our knowledge base article for details on the canonical link tag and how the Feed to Post add-on helps you set it.