WordPress is always my weapon of choice when i’m working on a personal or client project simply because it’s so flexible to work with and there’s tons of themes and plugins out there that will make WordPress a great script to work with.

One of the things i’m working on now is using WordPress as a directory at Events For London, for that site i needed the post from only a single category (articles) to make it to the frontpage while the other categories to not make it to the frontpage but available on their respective categories, archives, search, etc.

Category Visibility Plugin

So, in order to achieve that i turned to the Category Visibility Plugin, it’s a superb plugin that made my job a little easier and while playing with the plugin i discovered that you could actually set it in such a way that your post of choice could be read only by your RSS readers, however the post will be on your blog with it’s on permalink and all but you could also set it so that that particular post does not appear in your archives, categories page and search, making it impossible for your blog readers to read it unless there are subscribed to your RSS feeds (or if Google indexed that post, but you could easily bypass that via .htacess).

Here is a screenshot of the plugin’s settings page:

I am sure by now your playing with some ideas in your head, this could actually boost your RSS subscription count and create a sense of exclusiveness for your readers, basically the plugin as it’s name implies makes certain categories “visible” or “invisible”.

All you have to do is assigned your post to a category that is made for your RSS readers only, for example if you have a category named “Articles” all you need to do is go to the Category Visibility setting page and deselect “Front”, “List”, “Search”, “Archives”, “User Level” and select “Feed” for that particular category.

* Front: Posts show up on the main (home) page.
* List: Categories that will show up in the List of categories in the sidebar.
* Search: Posts show up in search results.
* Feed: Posts show up in the main RSS/Atom feed.
* Archive: Posts show up in archive links (i.e., clicking on the calendar links)

Warning: I have personally tried this plugin on WordPress 2.1 and 2.2 branch and it works fine, however i have never tested it with 2.3, so i don’t know if it still works.

Go ahead, give it a try and all the best to you. - Visit & Download the Category Visibility Plugin

CUSTOM RSS FEEDS

This has nothing to do with the above post but it’s a short and simple tip and i figured i might as well post it here instead of starting another post.

On my Photoblog i have made it a little easier for people to subscribe to a particular category, seen here.

I did that because some viewers would rather subscribe to the “sexy” category only instead of all the other categories.

To do that is a simple as pie, just place this: /feed after your category name.

Example:

If you have a category named “photos” just use this:

http://yourdomainname.com/category/photos/feed

Simple yeah?

Enjoy

Popularity: 4% [?]

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!