Cultivate Manual RSS

Build custom RSS feeds where posts are sorted by the date added to the category, not their publish date.

This plugin is typically used alongside MailChimp or ConvertKit to program curated emails generated by RSS feeds.

Installation

Click this link to download the Cultivate Manual RSS plugin. This will put a zip file on your computer.

In your WordPress site, go to Plugins > Add New > Upload and upload the zip file, then activate the plugin.

Note: I’ve submitted this to the WordPress plugin directory, and once approved you’ll be able to install it by searching in Plugins > Add New.

Using the plugin

Once installed, go to Posts > RSS Categories to create one or more RSS Categories. When editing a post, you can assign them to these RSS categories.

Hover over the RSS Category name and click “View” to see the archive page for this category. Posts on this archive are sorted by the date they were added to this category, not by their post date.

Example URL: yoursite.com/cultivate_rss/daily-email/

Add /feed/ to the end of the URL to get the RSS feed, which you can use in MailChimp and ConvertKit to generate your curated emails.

Example URL: yoursite.com/cultivate_rss/daily-email/feed/

Prevent indexing by Google

We recommend excluding these categories from your XML Sitemap so Google doesn’t index them.

Go to Yoast SEO > Settings. In the “Categories & Tags” section, select “RSS Categories” and uncheck “Show rss categories in search results”.

Developer Customization

This plugin includes filters to allow your theme developer to customize the output. For more information, see the GitHub repo.

cultivate_manual_rss_post_types
Array: Post types that support this taxonomy.
Default: [ 'post' ]

cultivate_manual_rss_args
Array: Arguments passed to register_taxonomy()

Change the URL slug

The code snippet below changes the Rewrite URL slug from “cultivate_rss” to “my_custom_rss”:

add_filter( 'cultivate_manual_rss_args', function( $args ) {
	$args['rewrite'] = [ 'slug' => 'my_custom_rss' ];
	return $args;
} );Code language: PHP (php)