Many of our clients use RSS to power their email newsletters with Kit or MailChimp, but there’s an issue.
The RSS feed sorts posts by their published date, so to send an existing recipe out to your subscribers via RSS, you have to re-publish the post. Changing the publish date can have wide ranging effects – it will change the order of posts on your homepage and categories, and could affect the SEO of that post.
This is where Cultivate Manual RSS comes in. It lets you create custom categories like “Updated Posts” or “Weekly Email”. The RSS feed of that category sorts posts by the date the post was added to the category, not the publish date.
This solution is working great! I just received my RSS email with an updated post, and I like how the date reflects today instead of the date of publication (13 years ago).
Kathryne Taylor, Cookie+Kate
Once you have your email marketing service connected to your RSS feed, sending out a new email is as simple as editing the post, selecting the appropriate category, and saving the post. This will bump that post to the top of that category’s RSS feed and send out an email.
These categories are separate from your normal categories. They are in a custom taxonomy called “RSS Categories” so you can exclude them from your XML Sitemap in Yoast SEO.
You can also use the RSS Categories with our Post Listing block. If you select just one RSS Category, it will sort the results by the date that post was added to the category, matching the RSS feed.
For more information, see the Cultivate Manual RSS plugin page.