Textpattern Find: Combine Sections Into One RSS Feed

I’ve pretty much all but decided that I will not be working with Textpattern anymore. It seems too much work when WordPress does most of what I want so easily. However, I still have one website that is running on a custom Textpattern backend, so once in a while I need solutions geared towards Textpattern. Today I found a great little nugget that I hope will help others.

We know that Textpattern relies heavily on sections. Traditionally, if you want to setup one section of your site as the blog, the RSS functionality for Textpattern will only add articles for that particular section. So what happens when you want to combine two or more sections into one RSS feed? Previously, you were out of luck…that is, until the aks_header plugin came along.

With this plugin, you can group sections into one feed. Exactly what I needed to do with the A Pretty Rock website, to allow feeding one RSS feed to NetworkedBlogs for its Facebook Fan page. It works great!

Want to learn how to do this yourself? Read this excellent article: Create and customize your own RSS feeds. It explains a method using the plugin aks_header to group and manage RSS feeds like ordinary Textpattern articles. Note that the Textpattern tag, “txp_article_custom”, permits the use of comma separated list of sections, which is how you get your feed to pull from more than one section.

Problem solved!