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Hidden feeds: categories, tags, authors, search terms, links

December 14, 2009 Stephanie Leary 4 Comments

WordPress generates a number of other feeds in addition to those for posts and comments. There’s a feed for each of your categories and tags. You can also get feeds of posts written by an individual author. You can even get feeds for search results!

Since WordPress doesn’t advertise these hidden feeds, you’ll have to do a little URL manipulation to find them. Of course, once you’ve located them, you can place the links somewhere in your theme so your visitors can find them too.

Since RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0 are the most popular formats, I’ve given those as the examples for the hidden feeds. However, all four formats are available for all the feeds listed below (except Links). If you want RSS 0.92 or RDF feeds, just replace the appropriate acronyms in the URLs.

Feeds in WordPress
Feed Type Default URL Clean URL
Posts RSS 2.0
default
/?feed=rss2 /feed or
/feed/rss2
Posts Atom 1.0 /?feed=atom /feed/atom
Posts RSS 0.92 /?feed=rss /feed/rss
Posts RDF /?feed=rdf /feed/rdf
Comments /?feed=comments-rss2
/?feed=comments-atom
/comments/feed
/comments/feed/atom
Category
ID: 1,
slug: news
/?feed=rss2&cat=1
/?feed=atom&cat=1
/category/news/feed
/category/news/feed/atom
Tag
slug: book
/?feed=rss2&tag=book
/?feed=atom&tag=book
/tag/book/feed
/tag/book/feed/atom
Multiple Tags
slugs: book, mystery
/?feed=rss2&tag=book+mystery
/?feed=atom&tag=book+mystery
/tag/book+mystery/feed
/tag/book+mystery/feed/atom
Author
ID: 2,
nickname: Joe
/?feed=rss2&author=2
/?feed=atom&author=2
/author/joe/feed
/author/joe/feed/atom
Search Term
mystery
/?feed=rss2&s=mystery
/?feed=atom&s=mystery
/feed/?s=mystery
/feed/atom/?s=mystery
Links OPML 1.0 /wp-links-opml.php n/a

Are there any more that I’ve overlooked? Let me know!

WordPress atom, Blogroll, categories, feeds, links, Notifications, opml, Permalinks, rss, search, tags

This is an excerpt from Content Strategy for WordPress.My latest books are Content Strategy for WordPress (2015) and WordPress for Web Developers (2013). Sign up to be notified when I have a new book for you.

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Tom says

    July 18, 2010 at 1:26 pm

    Hi!

    It looks like as if
    – “?feed=rss2&cat=XXX” or
    – “?cat=42&feed=rss2”

    is not working in 3.0, see example here:
    http://www.csr-news.net/main/?feed=rss2&cat=1682

    Do you have any advise?

    Thanks
    Tom

    Reply
    • steph says

      July 19, 2010 at 9:07 am

      Tom, in that case, you can use http://csr-news.net/main/category/main-categories/for-editors-only/csr-live-chat/feed/. If it’s a single category and you have a permalink structure set up, all you have to do is add /feed to the end.

      Reply
      • Tom says

        July 30, 2010 at 11:06 am

        Thanks Steph.

        This works and I know. The thing is that I really need to control the specific cat feed with the cat ID since I do have two systems interacting with each other.

        Any ideas how to do so with WP 3 (worked always fine including 2.9)

        Thanks
        Tom

        Reply

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