How to Activate Syndication on Drupal Sites

One of the coolest things about RSS in Drupal is that you never need to worry about creating the feeds yourself. Almost any list of nodes in Drupal has an RSS feed associated with it. Your homepage automatically has an RSS feed, as well as any category pages you create. Even pages created with the Views module have RSS feeds. The trick is that all of these RSS feeds are hidden from view. And if your visitors can’t see then, then they can’t subscribe to your content.

Luckily, there is a sweet module that helps you show your RSS feeds to your visitors. It’s called Syndication, and it’s another fine module from Moshe Weitzman. Here is how you set it up:

1.Download the Syndication module and install it like any normal Drupal module.

2. Go to your admin screen and click on Administer | Content Management | RSS feed syndication link. You’ll see the RSS feed syndication screen.

3. Enter the number of columns you would like to have displayed on the syndication page.

4. Select Blogs if you would like each user’s blog RSS feed to show up on the syndication page.

5. Under Vocabularies, select the category that you would like to show up on the syndication page.

6. You may want to leave the Taxonomy terms with no nodes option, set at the default of Do not show terms which are not used by any nodes.

7. Click on Save Configuration.

This should get you well on your way to syndicating to your content (with the Syndication module) and creating visible RSS feeds for your Drupal-optimized site. If you are need of further consulting on all things Drupal, check out the Drupal 6 Search Engine Optimization book for more professional Drupal SEO tips, or give Volacci a call.