Redirect WordPress Individual Category Feeds to Feedburner via HTAccess
Time for another Feedburner redirect tutorial! In our previous FeedBurner-redirect post, I provide an improved HTAccess method for redirecting your site’s main feed and comment feed to their respective Feedburner URLs. In this tutorial, we are redirecting individual WordPress category feeds to their respective FeedBurner URLs. We will also look at the complete code required to redirect all of the above: the main feed, comments feed, and of course any number of individual category feeds. Let’s jump into it..
Initial Setup
As we are redirecting our category feeds to their associated FeedBurner URLs, you will first want to make sure that these feeds exist and are accessible. Once you have the URLs of the FeedBurner feeds for your categories, make a list of their associated WordPress categories for easy reference. In addition to this information, you will need:
- A WordPress-powered blog (with the required categories)
- An Apache server with the
mod_rewritemodule enabled - Access to to your domain’s root HTAccess file (or to httpd.conf)
For this tutorial, we will assume the following hypothetical WordPress/Feedburner feed URLs:
- Main feed:
http://domain.tld/feed/
==http://feeds.feedburner.com/main-feed - Comments feed:
http://domain.tld/comments/feed/
==http://feeds.feedburner.com/comments-feed - “Business” category feed:
http://domain.tld/category/business/feed/
==http://feeds.feedburner.com/business-feed - “Pleasure” category feed:
http://domain.tld/category/pleasure/feed/
==http://feeds.feedburner.com/pleasure-feed - “Nonsense” category feed:
http://domain.tld/category/nonsense/feed/
==http://feeds.feedburner.com/nonsense-feed
Redirecting Category Feeds
Here is the generalized HTAccess code that we will be using to redirect our three categories:
# Redirect WordPress Category Feeds to Feedburner
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !^.*(FeedBurner|FeedValidator) [NC]
RewriteRule ^category/business/feed/?.*$ http://feeds.feedburner.com/business-feed [L,NC,R=302]
RewriteRule ^category/pleasure/feed/?.*$ http://feeds.feedburner.com/pleasure-feed [L,NC,R=302]
RewriteRule ^category/nonsense/feed/?.*$ http://feeds.feedburner.com/nonsense-feed [L,NC,R=302]
</IfModule>That’s the core of this tutorial, right there. The first line checks for the existence of the required Apache module, mod_rewrite, while the second line enables the module (you may remove this line if already included in your file). Then, the third line ensures that the two Feedburner user agents are not redirected. The next three lines each match against a specific category feed URL and subsequently redirect the request to the appropriate Feedburner counterpart. Further, we are using the “No-Case” ( [NC] ) modifier to ensure case-insensitive pattern matching for all directives. Finally, each of the three rewrites is executed as a “Temporary” ( [R=302] ) redirect.
Now, to implement this method, edit the last three lines according to your specific category and Feedburner feed information. Double-check that the changes are accurate. For additional categories, duplicate one of the three RewriteRules and edit as necessary. For fewer categories, simply delete one or two of the last three lines and edit as necessary.
Once you have edited the code to meet your needs, place the entire chunk of code into your site’s root HTAccess file. If your WordPress installation is located in a subdirectory, you may also place the code in the root HTAccess for that subdirectory. In either case, make sure that this code is placed before the default WordPress permalink rules.
Once uploaded to your server, verify functionality by navigating to your redirected category feeds. If everything is place and edited correctly, the redirects should be working and your category feed URLs should be opening their associated Feedburner feeds.
Redirecting Main, Comments, and Category Feeds
Chances are, if you are redirecting your WordPress category feeds to Feedburner, you will also want to redirect your blog’s main feed and comments feed as well. With our category-redirect code in place, we simply need to add two additional lines of code:
RewriteRule ^feed/?.*$ http://feeds.feedburner.com/main-feed [L,NC,R=302]
RewriteRule ^comments/?.*$ http://feeds.feedburner.com/comments-feed [L,NC,R=302]Edit these two lines of code with your particular feed information and then place them into the category-redirect code as follows:
# Redirect WordPress Category Feeds to Feedburner
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !^.*(FeedBurner|FeedValidator) [NC]
RewriteRule ^feed/?.*$ http://feeds.feedburner.com/main-feed [L,NC,R=302]
RewriteRule ^comments/?.*$ http://feeds.feedburner.com/comments-feed [L,NC,R=302]
RewriteRule ^category/business/feed/?.*$ http://feeds.feedburner.com/business-feed [L,NC,R=302]
RewriteRule ^category/pleasure/feed/?.*$ http://feeds.feedburner.com/pleasure-feed [L,NC,R=302]
RewriteRule ^category/nonsense/feed/?.*$ http://feeds.feedburner.com/nonsense-feed [L,NC,R=302]
</IfModule>With that code in place (and properly edited), your server will redirect all requests for your blog’s main, comments, and specified category feeds to their respectively associated Feedburner feed URLs. All other types of feeds (tags, post comments, author feeds, etc.) will not be affected and will appear as normal when requested.
Props
Thanks to Alexander for his question about redirecting category feeds. His code was used as the catalyst for the elaborated techniques presented in this article.
35 responses to “Redirect WordPress Individual Category Feeds to Feedburner via HTAccess”
@Jeff
The funny part is the main feed is valid not the category one. And worst part is i have a max of 5 posts in that category.
Did not work for me whatsoever, in fact it broke my main feed redirect using feedsmith. Went back to original htaccess and had to deactivate then reactivate the feedsmith plugin to get the redirect working again. Could the plugin have caused a conflict so this failed? Deleted feedsmith plugin, somehow my main feed is still redirecting to feedburner and I have no idea how! htaccess has no feed redirects, no feedsmith plugin, but it still redirects, is the redirect cached somewhere? Guess I’ll wait to see if it eventually stops redirecting, then I’ll try to update htaccess again.
got all of them working except for one now, no end of tinkering. i suspect i had issues because i starting changing the feedburner url’s before putting in the redirect rules, and possibly feedburner hadn’t updated yet, so when it tried to grab the original feed it got a redirect or something, i’d recommend not doing this. in the end i deleted feedsmith plugin, started with a fresh htaccess, and now like i said, all feeds are redirecting appropriately except for one category feed. i’ve check it many times and the code is correct, no idea why this one refuses to redirect. hopefully it’s a caching issue and will resolve itself, will post again.
finally working for everything! removed all redirection, resynced feedburner, waited 10 minutes, put redirection back into htaccess, works fine now. thanks for the post!!
Hi David, wow that’s quite the drama! Thanks for following up with the solution — glad to hear you got it working :)
Had to come back and post again, I realized that when I implement these rules my feedburner feeds stop updating. My best guess is that when feedburner requests the original xml, it is forwarded to the feedburner feed, and so there is a loop created. I’m guessing this code is intended to tell the feedburner service not to follow the redirect?
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !^.*(FeedBurner|FeedValidator) [NC]But perhaps it’s not working for me for some reason? It would explain the difficulties I had at the beginning as well. But could there be some other reason for this not working? I can’t think of anything else.
Here’s an example of my htaccess, please let me know if you see anything wrong. Thank you!!!
# BEGIN WordPress# Redirect Wordpress Category Feeds to Feedburner<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>RewriteEngine onRewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !^.*(FeedBurner|FeedValidator) [NC]RewriteRule ^feed/?.*$ http://feeds.feedburner.com/feedname [L,NC,R=302]RewriteRule ^category/category-name/feed/?.*$ http://feeds.feedburner.com/feed-name [L,NC,R=302]RewriteEngine OnRewriteBase /RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-fRewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-dRewriteRule . /index.php [L]</IfModule># END WordPressdont bother with what i went through :)
use this plugin
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/feedburner-plugin/
it can redirect category feed automatically.
cheers!
Hi david,
Not sure what the issue might be, I have tested this code and used it myself on a number of occasions. One thing that may be causing some trouble is the way in which you have placed the FeedBurner directives inside the WordPress permalink container. Newer versions of WordPress auto-detect the presence of a specific sequence of permalink directives, and if no match is found, it rewrites/re-includes them. So things may be getting overwritten/modified on the server without the user actually being aware (kinda bad, really).
Other than that, not sure. Others seem to have used the code successfully, but if a plugin works for you, then by all means go with it.
Btw, I didn’t think that there were any FeedBurner plugins that actually handled the category-specific redirects.. Are all of your feeds pointed to the same FeedBurner URL?
not exactly sure i understand what the permalink issue would be, but the plugin has the option of redirecting all categories to one url, or of appending category name to the url, so like FEEDBURNERURL_categoryname which allows you to create category feeds automatically
Yes, nice – I just downloaded and checked out a copy for myself. Looks like just the ticket for handling individual tag and category feeds, something that wasn’t possible with a plugin back when I wrote this article. Thanks for sharing your solution – good to know.
Great, I have been learning how to use .htaccess and regular expression for sometime now, thanks for the example, really helpfull.
Same with me. I am getting recursive redirection error