RSS Aggregator Plugin for WordPress – Review

Today, I am going to talk about WP RSS Aggregator, a plugin developed by Jean Galea of WP Mayor. He recently requested us to review his plugin and I was happy to do that , because I have been looking for a good, robust RSS plugin and this one actually surpassed my expectations.

Everyday, an overwhelming amount of data is generated across the web world. Browsing through all of this and extracting what is really relevant, can be a challenge. Subscribing to RSS feeds for reputed sites is a simple way to gather useful content and then read it your leisure or publish it and share it on your website.

WP RSS Aggregator is perfect for this. It is a very simple yet powerful plugin that only imports relevant feeds straight on your dashboard. In your dashboard, you can make changes and add a personal touch before you publish it.
This is perfect for an information blog, community site, News site or some niche sites where you need to provide fresh and important information to your readers everyday.

With the help of this plugin, you can import unlimited data from more than one site to your WordPress blog. All of this can be done with the use of simple shortcodes or use “Call the display” functionality.

Let’s see how you can use it.

I started with the free version of WP RSS Aggregator from WordPress org. With this particular plugin, I could display only the List of Title and Source of the article on my site, it was useful as it served my purpose.
A list of feeds will be shown from the RSS feed of the site that you add to the plugin. Here’s a screenshot of the display results

As you can tell, this is a simple elegant way of displaying RSS feeds on your site.

The plugin operates on a freemium model, so apart from the core plugin available for free on WordPress.org, there are also a number of premium add-ons.

1. Excerpts & Thumbnails

This add-on has the capability to display the feeds as thumbnails that help you bring life to your post. Here you can decide the amount of excerpts you want to display. You can display a teaser to compel your users to click on the article.

2. Categories

With this add-on you can assign feed sources to categories. That will enable you to use the shortcode with the category parameter, thus having for example a page showing feed items from the sources in the category Sports, while another page shows feed items from the sources in the category Politics. Very useful.

3. Keyword Filtering:

Take Control of feeds which are displayed on your post. You can filter and import feeds which contain specific keywords you want to target.
You can use keywords, keyphrases and categories.

Settings for this are quite simple as you can see the screen shot below

Once keywords are added you’re done. Now you only need to wait for the feeds to show up.

 4. Feed to Post Add-On

I really liked this add-on because of the flexibility that it offers. You can have all imported feed items saved into any custom post type (including the default Posts) and also different states. For example you can set all items to import into Posts as drafts ( you can change it to publish later) so that you can make small tweaks , add a few comments before you publish it.

Some of the features that stand out –
– Schedule feed imports and set featured images
– Add custom links back to the source ( it’s helpful if you’re an affiliate)
– Auto Setting of Authors
– Remove elements from imported content
– Force full content import
– Import videos from YouTube, Vimeo, etc.

 About WP RSS Aggregator plugin, I would like to say that it does what it says and some more. It is a very powerful plugin that you can use on your blog to curate useful data.

You can download the core plugin for free –
http://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-rss-aggregator/

You can download the Add-On here –

http://www.wprssaggregator.com/extensions/

So go ahead and take this for a test drive. Do let me know what you think about it.