The Better Feed Plugin – Your Feed on Steroids!

If you’re a long time WordPress user like myself, you may have gotten used to using the  <!– more –> tag to display teaser material in your RSS feeds.  If so, the decision to remove support for this feature in the 2.5 release of WordPress may have had you a bit put off. Since WordPress 2.5, you either had to go with full feeds, (Not good in cases where traffic to your blog = money) or you had to fill in the description field for each and every post.  (Honestly, if I wanted to use Joomla! I would have been doing so already!)

Enter the Better Feed plugin from Ozh.  Not only does this bad boy return you to the stock behavior of earlier WordPress versions, but it allows you to add just about anything you ever thought of to the footer of your RSS feed. How about Post word counts, custom (Read More) text, number of comments, a nice little reminder that you’re running a contest?  You name it, this plugin will do it.

I’ve used several plugins over the past few years that added advertising to my RSS feeds, but none of those solutions was very elegant.  Better Feed makes this process simple.  Each time a new round of advertisements that I feel my readers would be interested in comes through my inbox, I simply append the best of them using the plugin interface, hit save and forget about it until next week.  No more worrying about whether I’ve fubar-ed the code for one of five rotating ad choices or mucking with a management script designed to handle far more than I will ever need on a C-list blog. (I’m working at hitting th A-List, but hey, it takes time!)

There is a bit of a learning curve to Better Feed, but It’s nothing that should send you into a fit.  The tags are pretty straightforward and the editor will be familiar to anyone who has ever edited their comments before.  Getting things to look just the way you’d like may take a bit of time, but you’ll get there, don’t worry.

In the end, I’m listing this as one of my “Must have” WordPress plugins.  I just don’t know what I’d do without it at this point!

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