[SpiralOcean]

Hey OmniFolks... here's how to do it:

http://www.vbulletin-faq.com/forum/s...ead.php?t=7439

So, you activated the RSS feed of your forum, someone told you (most likely a user) that it would be a nice feature to have. But you maybe don't care one way or the other, it can't hurt, right?.

But then you start to wonder how it is being used, or maybe how could you promote it's use, since you've heard that it can become a good way to publicize your forum. The bad news is, well, the RSS and other feed implementations in vBulletin are very basic, you're not able to offer your feed in other more esoteric formats, such as ATOM. You're not able to know how your feeds are being used, at least know how many hits has generated, or how many subscribers do you have, or in what apps or webservices is being used, such as google reader/google homepage, my Yahoo!, my AOL or Newsgator.

Enter Feedburner. With a good set of free tools, Feedburner greatly improves control and presentation of your feed to your potential subscribers. For starters, you can have a web browser friendly preview of your feed, instead of showing the raw XML code for previous versions of IE and Firefox (current ones show their own previews). You also have basic stats (number of subscribers and what kind of webapp or reader/aggregator are they using). Also, with just activating one option, you can translate your feed automagically to a good variety of feed formats, such as other versions of RSS or ATOM and so make it compatible with almost any kind of application or reader.

To "burn" your feeds, you just need to create a free account (paid services include more advanced stats, all other services are free) and add your current feed URL, you know, the http://www.yoursite.com/forum/external.php address. Once you're done, you have a slightly more intuitive url (http://feeds.feedburner.com/YourFeedName), then you can start playing with other settings, as Feedburner gives you a centralized place where you can control many usable aspects of all your forum feeds.

For instance, have you ever wanted to setup a different feed title and description for a single forum feed?. With a default vBulletin this is next to impossible to do. If you have both the general feed and the single forum feed burned you can do it quite easily just by going to the Title/Description Burner options in the Optimize tab of your Feedburner panel.

Do you have a podcast feed?, while the podcast feed tools in vBulletin are adequate, managing your feed inside Feedburner provides you a wider and easier control of the feed, making it also more compatible with other services apart from Itunes.

So what's the catch?, none that I have been able to discern. Feedburner is a service that has quite a few years under his belt, and it can also help you monetize your feeds if you choose to participate in their own ad network, which is why they can offer so many services free of charge, but that's totally optional.

Also, be sure to edit your headinclude template to change the default auto-discovery tag of your forum to the "burned" feed. For this you must look for the following code in the aforementioned template:

PHP Code:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="$vboptions[bbtitle] RSS Feed" href="external.php?type=RSS2" />
And make the following edits:

PHP Code:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Your Feed Title" href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/YourFeedName" />
Have fun with your burned feeds!