What is My WordPress Feed URL?

By Jeff Starr on Sunday, March 9, 2008 — 46 Responses

Post #514 categorized as WordPress, last updated on Apr 20, 2008
Tagged with feeds, notes, permalink, reference, rss, tips, url, WordPress

[ ~{*}~ ] For future reference, this article covers each of the many ways to access your WordPress-generated feeds. Several different URL formats are available for the various types of WordPress feeds — posts, comments, and categories — for both permalink and default URL structures. For each example, replace “http://domain.tld/” with the URL of your blog. Note: even though your blog’s main feed is accessible through many different URLs, there are clear benefits to using a single, consistent feed URL throughout your site.

WordPress Post-Feed Formats for Permalinks

If you have permalinks enabled on your site, your main-content (posts) feed is accessible via the following URLs, depending on which feed format you would like to use:

WordPress Post-Feed Formats for Default URLs (non-permalink)

By default, your main-content (posts) feed is accessible via the following URLs, depending on desired format:

WordPress Post-Feed Formats via Query String (non-permalink)

Alternately, your main-content (posts) feed is also available at the following URLs, depending on desired format:

Display your Default Post-Feed URLs

To determine/display the default posts feed URL for your blog’s main content, place any or all of these template tags into a useful location in one of your theme files:

WordPress Main Comments Feed

Your blog’s main comments feed is available only in RSS 2.0 format, but there are several URL options from which to choose:

Display your Main-Comments Feed URL

To display the default URL for your main comments feed, add this template tag to your theme file and load the page in your browser:

<?php bloginfo('comments_rss2_url'); ?>

Post-Specific Comment Feeds

By default, every post also delivers its own feed featuring all of its comments. To display feed URLs for individual, post-specific comment feeds, place this template tag anywhere in the main post loop or comment loop 1:

<?php comments_rss_link('Subscribe to comments on this post via RSS-2.0 feed'); ?>

Alternately, to display the comment feed URL for any specific post, simply append either of the following to the original post URL:

Here is an example of each method for a generalized post URL:

Update: When using default (non-permalink) URLs, the post-specific comment feeds are available via the following format:

http://domain.tld/?feed=rss2&p=123

..where "p=" references the post ID (thanks to Spamboy for sharing this information).

Category Feeds

To display individual category feed URLs, use either of the following formats 2:

References

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#1 — Louis

It may be nice to mention that you can (and should) disallow search-engine crawlers to index your feed, by adding some nice rules to your robots.txt file.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /feed
Disallow: /comments/feed
Disallow: /feed/$
Disallow: /*/feed/$
Disallow: /*/feed/rss/$
Disallow: /*/*/feed/$
Disallow: /*/*/feed/rss/$
Disallow: /*/*/*/feed/$
Disallow: /*/*/*/feed/rss/$

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#2 — Perishable

Great point, but I prefer the following method:

User-agent: *
Disallow: */feed/*

Works for me!

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#3 — Louis

Well, I tested this code with Google Tools, and it’s working the same as my 9 lines !

Thank you :D

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#4 — Oeroek

NIce article and it brings an old unsolved question of mine to the surface again.

I was working to make links to my feed rel=”nofollow”. I have no idea however, how I can do this with a line like:”"

I don’t want to go into the wordpress coding. Is there a simple solution, for example by changing the way I insert the link into my template?

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#5 — Ryan Williams

Louis, that sounds like it could cause some issues to me. I’m going to guess that at least one feed reader out there spiders its feeds much like a search engine robot — particularly ones that hunt down new feeds and recommend them to you such as Google Reader.

Some services like Google Blog Search and Google Alerts may also be affected, as they both rely on spidering their own feed content rather than having users specifically add feeds.

All three are very potent traffic sources by themselves.

In most cases I [i]do[/i] want my feeds to be discovered so I’m not really sure about the benefits of blocking any and all bots to be honest.

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#6 — Louis

Ryan, the issue here is to avoid duplicate content. If you submit a valid sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools, I don’t see any need for Google crawlers to use your feed.

You shouldn’t have the same content indexed by search engines again and again.

You may say that Google can regognize a xml feed page, and treat it appart. Well yes, it must be true, but I think for the principe of avoiding duplicate content, one should tell the robots not to crawl feeds.

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#7 — Perishable

@Oeroek: It looks like WordPress “ate” a key portion of your comment. Specifically, in the third line of your comment, there is a set of empty quotation marks. What’s missing? Note: wrapping terms in <code> tags prevents WP from devouring it ;)

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#8 — Oeroek

@perishable. thx

I would like to make the links to my comment feed and regular feed to be nofollow.

IN my template the following line of code is included.

<?php comments_rss_link('inschrijven'); ?>

How can I make this nofollow. Preferably in a way so that i only change the template and not the core code of wordpress.

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#9 — Perishable

Ah yes, I see now..

Here is the method that I use to reformat the entire comment feed link, including the addition of a descriptive title attribute as well as the requisite nofollow tag. I know it sucks to have to modify the core, but I haven’t had time to write a plugin to do the job (not even sure if one would be warranted). Perhaps WordPress 2.5 (released soon?) will finally incorporate this change? If not, I am sure there are other ways of doing it. I hope that helps! ;)

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#10 — Oeroek

It worked, thx a lot.

I keep a log with changes I make in themes and the core code.

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#11 — Perishable

That’s good to hear — I am glad the hack worked for you.. I really hate making such permanent changes “under the hood,” but keeping an active (current) change log certainly helps keep everything in order. Cheers!

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#12 — Jason

Thanks for the handy list. I’ve added links to most of these feed functions in my own Wordpress theme, but I plan to refer back here the next time I’m at someone else’s Wordpress site and I need to access a hidden feed.

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#13 — Perishable

Right on, Jason — such use is exactly what I had in mind while creating the article. In fact, one of the determining factors in choosing topics to write about is whether or not I will use the information myself, which is definitely the case here. Thanks for the feedback! :)

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#14 — Jack A

Hopefully, someone will have patience with me and help. I am trying to build a [WordPress] widget and looking for the url for my recent posts. If I add /feed/ to the end of my blog url, I get a news feed. Looking to make a widget with just titles.
Thanks…

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#15 — Perishable

Hi Jack, I am a bit confused as to your goal here.. feel free to send an email and I will do my best to help!

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#16 — shane

Great post topic, and it comes at just the right time for me. I am having the hardest time to get feedburner to display full content feed as opposed to partial feed. I suspect it may have something to do with with the way my feed is set up on my blog, BUT I am not that technically literate. TO be fooling about with that >>>> <link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=” RSS Feed” href=”" />
or does this look alright, either way I am unsure if this is the problem, currently I am using permalink redirect (plug-in) to redirect my feed to feedburner, and yes I have the full text box check off, and no I dont use the more tag. Though i think wordpress may be passing this along still, as my feed is stuck at partial

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#17 — Perishable

Sorry to hear that, shane. I was having the same problem myself for quite some time. Eventually, I found that a hearty blend of more tags, Full text option, and the incredible Full Text Feed plugin finally did the trick. I don’t know what will work for you, but you can always upgrade to WordPress 2.5 to avoid the entire hassle. By default, version 2.5 serves full feeds even when the more tag is used.

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#18 — Spamboy

There’s one additional format you’re missing…

If you’re using the default Permalink setting for WordPress, your post-specific feed would look like this:

http://domain.tld/?feed=rss2&p=123

Where "p=" is the Post ID.

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#19 — Perishable

Thank you for sharing this information, Spamboy. Technically, the default WordPress URL structure utilizes query string values (i.e., permalinks are disabled by default), but the format you provide is valid nonetheless. Incidentally, the ?feed=rss2&p=123 string works for default WordPress URLs and permalinks as well. In any case, I appreciate the info, and have updated the article with the additional format for post-specific comment feeds. Thanks again! :)

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#20 — NZ Beats

I’m trying to get an rss feed from a sub category, but not having any luck. Is there a chance you could help. I am using permalinks and the parent category name is review while the sub category name is album review the slug is album-review.

I have tried the following with no luck:

http://www.nzbeats.com/category/album-review/feed/
http://www.nzbeats.com/category/review/feed/

Is there something I am doing wrong here?

Thanks NZ Beats

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#21 — NZ Beats

Got it working using the following:

http://www.nzbeats.com/?feed=rss2&category_name=album-review

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#22 — Jeff Starr

@NZ Beats: Thanks for sharing the solution with us! Glad to hear you got it working ;) Cheers!

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#23 — Erin

What about feeds for individual posts (i.e. not their comments). I noticed this feed was being used by one of my readers:

http://domain.tld/?p=123&feed=rss2&withoutcomments=1

Also, doesn’t WordPress also generate tag feeds?

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#24 — Jeff Starr

@Erin: individual post feeds are rare, but they certainly are available. The addition of the &withoutcomments=1 parameter looks like it removes the comments from appearing in the feed, although I have never actually seen that format used before (until now!). I suppose one reason that individual post feeds would prove useful would be for articles that are expected to be updated with new information, such as might be seen for plugin and theme posts. Of course, most posts are not updated, so providing post feeds seems a bit pointless..

And yes, tag feeds are available in newer versions of WordPress; specifically, any WP version that supports tag functionality (from 2.5 onward, I think..). The format for tag feeds is similar to that of category and archive feeds.

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#25 — Jeromy

wow, great overview! What about comments feed per author? Is there a way to show a feed of comments on all posts written by a specific author? Like twitter?

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#26 — Jeff Starr

@Jeromy: yes, I am sure it is possible.. the WordPress Codex mentions them in the context of the wp_list_authors tag. I would imagine that the format is something similar to this:

http://your-domain.com/author/author-name/feed/

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#27 — Jeromy

yeah, no go. That feed structure shows all posts by an author, not all comments for an author or their posts. I would expect something like: http://www.site-name.com/author/jeromy/comments/feed - but that just bring up an empty feed page. I’m convinced this isn’t possible…maybe a custom query?? I’m not very good at those

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#28 — Jeff Starr

Ah, I missed that.. I didn’t read carefully enough that you were going for the comments feed of a particular author. That would definitely require some custom wrangling, but would certainly make for a great plugin. Actually, I wouldn’t be surprised if something similar didn’t already exist!

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#29 — Jeromy

yeah, I’ve looked high and low for that. I pride myself on finding plugins and this one does not exist (well, searching wordpress.org/extend/plugins is nearly futile as all you never really get are the popular plugins as results). Guess I’ll keep looking

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#30 — Jeff Starr

I’ll keep my eyes open too and report back here if anything pops up. Good luck!

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#31 — Mr. Drive

Hi,

I have a blog at http://www.cayucorace.org, and I am displaying future posts in the website as events in the events category.

I would like to organize the information displayed in the main RSS FEED so that posts are displayed by category (such as in the index page of this blog), by displaying the latest 5 posts of the categories I choose. Everything should work fine for all the categories, except for the Events category since the last 5 posts will be three months into the future.

In other words, I would like the feed to display the upcoming next 5 events/posts form “today”, only for the EVENTS category, and to display the last 5 posts for the other categories.

Is this feasible with the current wordpress implementation?
Are there any plugins that allow me to do this?

In several occasions, your blog has helped me a lot in doing intrepid things with wordpress, i.e. in using wordpress for what it is not supposed to be used =). Thanks a lot!

BTW, your blog style looks awesome!

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#32 — Jeff Starr

@Mr. Drive: Hmmm.. that’s a new one to me. I haven’t heard of any plugin that works on feeds in the manner you describe. There is a plugin called AStickyPostOrderER that handles such functionality for index views — perhaps it could be tweaked to affect feeds as well?

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#33 — Michelle

Thanks so much - this has been so helpful!

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#34 — gaurav nanda

Hi,
This article has been very helpful,thanks for sharing such important info in such simple form

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#35 — Hansen

Just wanted to add that you can use:

?feed=rss2&s=searchquery

to search with your feed :)

Now I’m looking for a complete list of what variables you can use in default format. So far I know of cat, p and s but there should be more.

Thanks

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#36 — Hansen

Found another one so you can get all posts for specific years, months or days:

?feed=rss2&amp;m=2009
?feed=rss2&amp;m=200903
?feed=rss2&amp;m=2009034

Now I just need a way to offset the posts in a rss query (so I can get posts 11-20 for example). Any takers?

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#37 — Maggie

Hi
I am trying to get the code to embed the wordpress feed into another website.
The various widgets do not seem to be able to read my rss feed
http://wordpress.integrateful.net/wp-rss2.php or
http://integrateful.net/wordpress/?feed=rss2

yet if I put them in the browser they work fine.

what am I missing? - is there some way to work out how to embed them myself instead of using widgets?

thanks for this website

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#38 — Jeff Starr

@Hansen: That’s some great stuff — thanks for sharing it with everyone. Sorry no help for the feed query offset..

@Maggie: If you are trying to add the feeds to your sidebar, you will need to access and edit the sidebar.php file on your server..

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#39 — sylvain

Do you think it is possible to retreive the feed content from a tag url ?
For my part, i got a tag saison-6 and i want to retreive the last post with this tag

http://www.series-tv-news.fr/tag/saison-6

Thank you for your help

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#40 — Goddess of Clarity

Thanks for the great resource! It proved extremely helpful today.

Wanted to add another Feed URL, this one for tags:

http://mysite.tld/?feed=rss2&tag=nanotechnology

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#41 — Jeff Starr

@Goddess of Clarity: Absolutely my pleasure! Thanks for the feedback and for sharing the feed format for tags. Much appreciated! :)

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#42 — Tom O'Reilly

Any idea what I should do to resolve this issue? I’d appreciate any direction you can give me. Thanks.

Not Found
The requested URL /feed/ was not found on this server.

Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

Apache/2.2.11 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.11 OpenSSL/0.9.8e-fips-rhel5 mod_auth_passthrough/2.1 mod_bwlimited/1.4 FrontPage/5.0.2.2635 PHP/5.2.8 Server at daytradingthecurrencymarket.com Port 80

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#43 — Jeff Starr

@Tom O’Reilly: Do you have permalinks enabled?

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