Invision Power Board Tutorial  

Add RSS Feeds to IPB

Adding live news feed to your forum can really enliven things up; providing the latest news to your community is an irreplaceable feature that every site owner wants to have.

You can gain a thorough understanding of what is RSS feeds here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_(protocol), as this is out of the scope of this tutorial.

You can add the feed from Management tab in the admincp:

• Click on RSS Import Manager

• In the right window click on "Create New RSS Import Stream":

• Enter the required information. You must fill in all the fields in order to activate the feed. In our example we will add Yahoo World News. You can view the links to all Yahoo rss feeds here (http://news.yahoo.com/rss). Click on an RSS button and copy the link location. You will enter this in RSS Import Stream URL:

Another option you must define here is the Character Set encoding. Setting the value to UTF-8 will ensure that the feed can read almost all languages.

• Next thing you should configure is the actual content options:

Important options here are the forum selection (into which forum you would like to display the feed). RSS Import Preserve HTML - if you have this option enabled it will preserve the original format of the RSS page. For this to work you must set "Enable HTML Posting" to Yes in the forum's settings.

RSS Importers name - set this to a valid forum's user

RSS Import Add Link to Post - you can leave this option empty

RSS Import Topic Prefix - enter a name that will appear in front of the actual news (e.g. News_Activists, Liberal Parties March in Moscow (AP)).

• Finally you should enter news refresh rate (240 minutes is just fine) and the number of news topics per page:

If all went through so far you should be able to see your newly created news feed in the forum:

This concludes the tutorial for Invision Power Board.