A news aggregator website isn't just about blindly throwing up content from an RSS feed.
To create a quality WordPress news aggregator website, you’ll want to make content sortable,
aggregate a variety of content, use a news-friendly theme and make sure you provide attribution.
So, in this video, I'll show you how to create a website
that meets these conditions and is built for success.
Let's get started!
Assuming that you already have a domain name and hosting, let's move to the step where
you need to choose the WordPress theme.
To build a content aggregator site on WordPress, you will need a solid theme and an RSS plugin
which can import feeds as headlines.
Your theme should be able to display multiple posts on the page.
If we take Neve as an example, you can see that you are able to set different layouts
for the blog page.
The masonry style is just perfect for a news aggregator website because you can choose
between many grid layouts, from 1 to 4-columns.
Enable or disable the masonry style over here, set the length of the excerpt over here and
set the post pagination in this drop-down
as number or infinite scroll.
What's totally new over here is that you can rearrange the content of your post by dragging
the excerpt above the thumbnail, and you can rearrange the elements of the metadata too.
More of that, if you want to disable certain portions of data shown on your blog page,
the author for example, just click on the
eye over here and that data will be hidden.
Cool, right?
There are more options and helpful settings you will discover in Neve so give it a try.
Its 100% free and you can download it by accessing the link in the description box below.
So, after the WordPress theme is up and running, the next thing you need is to select a plugin
that can help you collect and post the feeds into your articles.
If you want to see how to import RSS Feeds as posts into your WordPress website, check
out the recommended video above, but in this video, I will keep things as simple as possible.
So, just install the FEEDZY RSS feeds lite
plugin, which is free, and you are good to go
For WordPress blogs, it is nearly always a
case of adding "/feed" to the end of the site’s URL.
This is what you’ll see.
For any other page, you can look for the RSS feed icon or link, like the one on Huffingtonpost.com, for example.
When you find a feed that interests you, click on it to see a screen similar to this WordPress feed.
The URL of the page will be the feed URL you need for your content aggregator site.
To do that, click on FEEDZY → Feed Categories on your dashboard.
Click on Add Category to get started.
Give the Category a name and paste all of
your feeds in the Category Feeds editor.
Once you have entered the URLs, hit publish to get your first category up and ready.
Create more categories from other sources, if you want that, and move forward.
To import RSS feeds into your post and pages, use the Feedzy RSS Feeds block in your WordPress editor.
You can find that block in the Common Blocks tab, over here.
Just click on it and then insert the feed
URL you want to import feeds from or simply
type in the slug of your Feed Category.
As soon as you're ready, click Load Feed over here and wait until the content is imported.
Now its time to make some adjustments to make your feed look exactly as you want it.
Let's say you want to hide the feed title.
To do that, disable the "Display feed title?"
here, like so, and you will notice that the
title disappears instantly.
Moreover, you can set the number of feeds, feed caching time, sorting order and so on.
In the item options tab, you can set the behavior of the links like so.
Open links in a new tab or in the same tab.
Shrink the title character limit to any number you want, 30 for example and then you can
turn off the "Display post date & author"
and "Display post description".
Well, if you turn off the "Display post description" you will end up having only a title in your
feed items which is probably not recommended for posts.
I think that feature will be great in your
sidebar, for example, where
you have a much more limited space.
Even so, if you feel that there are too many characters in the description and you want
to reduce their number, use this field and
type in 140 for example.
Cool!
Further down, you can upload your own image near each feed or you can use the default
image the plugin comes with.
That is completely up to you and remember that you can also set the thumbnails dimension here.
Finally, in the Advanced tab, you can use
additional CSS classes.
Now you can click on Preview to see how your first article with aggregated news looks like.
Cool, right?
If you want to publish that article as it
is, come back to the block editor
and click publish over here.
If not, feel free to edit the content, add
more feeds or other blocks as well and publish the article
just when you feel ready for it.
Great.
The final step of the WordPress news aggregator website setup is done.
Thanks to WordPress’ ease of use, it’s
easy to create a WordPress news aggregator website.
You won’t need to code anything yourself
– all you’ll need to do is find the RSS
feeds for the websites that you want to aggregate content from.
I hope that you enjoyed this video.
If you do, hit the like button and if not,
unlike it.
I will appreciate your feedback, no matter
what.
Please let me know if you have any questions in the comments section below.
Make sure you subscribe to our channel and then feel free to check other videos we publish weekly.
See you in the next one.
