Overview of FeedBurner Redirect Methods: Three Ways to Manage Your Redirects

Overview of FeedBurner Redirect Methods: Three Ways to Manage Your Redirects
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Introduction

FeedBurner is one of the most popular RSS feed management solutions available. This solution is used by millions of bloggers, enabling them to follow detailed statistics concerning who (and in what amount) has subscribed to their RSS channel. It is very easy to register and set up a FeedBurner account, while there are several RSS to FeedBurner redirect methods. This article will describe three methods; redirection achieved with WordPress plugins, HTAccess modifications and finally with the PHP function.

Redirection Through WordPress Plugins

One of the most important characteristics of the WordPress platform is its extensibility. Probably all parts of the WordPress system are covered by numerous high-quality plugins, which are free in most cases. Therefore, it is not a surprise that there are several excellent plug-ins related to FeedBurner redirection. A brief description of two very popular plugins follows:

  • FeedBurner FeedSmith plugin: A bit outdated, this simple plugin was originally created by Steve Smith. While it’s now available on the official FeedBurner website, it is not available on the official WordPress plugins website. This plug-in requires nothing but a FeedBurner RSS address to be entered.
  • FD Feedburner plugin: This is one of the most popular plug-ins of this kind, counting nearly 200,000 downloads as of this writing. As opposed to FeedBurner FeedSmith plugin, it is compatible up to the latest WordPress editions. This plugin redirects the main feed, and optionally the comments feed, to FeedBurner. There is no need to perform any template and .htaccess modifications, and it does not require the setup of new hidden feeds, etc.

Redirection Through HTAccess Modifications

For most users, the above plugins will do, but on the other hand, there are WordPress developers and advanced users that will not be satisfied with the lack of customization abilities of these plugins. Therefore, developers may want to use advanced methods, such as the HTAccess modifications as described within this paragraph. HTAccess is usually situated within the website’s root directory, but in case it does not exist, it can be created manually.

For example, consider the case where a developer wants to redirect a certain category to a FeedBurner URL. For example , https://www.example.com/category/sports/feed/ is a WordPress RSS URL. On the other hand, the user has set the FeedBurner URL for this category, which is equal to https://feeds.feedburner.com/sports-feed. In order to manage this redirection (where the main RSS feed and Comments feed are both included as well) through HTAccess, it is required to insert the following lines of code into the HTAccess itself:

# Redirect Sport Category Feeds to FeedBurner

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>

RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !^.*(FeedBurner|FeedValidator) [NC]

RewriteRule ^feed/?.*$ https://feeds.feedburner.com/main-feed [L,NC,R=302]

RewriteRule ^comments/?.*$ https://feeds.feedburner.com/comments-feed [L,NC,R=302]

RewriteRule ^category/sports/feed/?.*$ https://feeds.feedburner.com/sports-feed [L,NC,R=302]

As simple as that. Naturally, it is possible to use as many custom lines of code as needed, where a reader should only change the category URL and corresponding FeedBurner URL. Finally, this method is also very handy as it does not require plugins and PHP server processing.

Redirection by Adding PHP Function to the Function.php File

The third FeedBurner redirect method is authored by PHP developer Justin Tadlock. This solution consists of putting the following lines of code into the function.php theme file:

function custom_feed_link($output, $feed) {

$feed_url = ‘https://feeds.feedburner.com/your-feedburner-feed';

$feed_array = array(

‘rss’ => $feed_url,

‘rss2’ => $feed_url,

‘atom’ => $feed_url,

‘rdf’ => $feed_url,

‘comments_rss2’ => ‘’

);

$feed_array[$feed] = $feed_url;

$output = $feed_array[$feed];

return $output;

}

add_filter(‘feed_link’,‘custom_feed_link’, 1, 2);

In order to apply this code, a reader should edit only $feed_url value. Furthermore, this solution can be extended, since it redirects only the main feeds. In order to redirect specific categories, the following lines of code should be used:

function other_feed_links($link) {

$link = ‘https://feeds.feedburner.com/your-feedburner-feed';

return $link;

}

add_filter(‘category_feed_link’, ‘other_feed_links’);

add_filter(‘author_feed_link’, ‘other_feed_links’);

add_filter(’tag_feed_link’,‘other_feed_links’);

add_filter(‘search_feed_link’,‘other_feed_links’);

In these lines, ‘category_feed_link’, ‘other_feed_links’ should be edited. Additional filters can be added easily, simply by adding new lines of code and corresponding URLs in the same way as it is showed in this solution.