How to use Feed to Post feature in Feedzy

For more details about the plugin, please check the main documentation first.

What can you do with the Feed to Post feature?  Using Feed to Post, you can easily import items from a feed (or more) as posts (or pages) or your sites.

Note: The Feed to Post feature is available in the free version of Feedzy RSS Feeds. For Premium Feed to Post options like custom fields, filters, importing more than 10 items per feed, and many more, make sure you use Feedzy RSS Feeds Pro.

The guide covers

• Managing import jobs
• Create and edit import jobs
• Feed Categories
• Custom scenarios
• Canonical URL
• Integration with Advanced Custom Fields plugin

How it looks like

The imported posts will be listed on the blog page, alongside other posts. The styling of the posts is controlled by the WordPress theme that you are using. Below is an example of our latest theme, Neve.

Managing import jobs

Import tasks can be created in Dashboard > Feedzy > Import Posts.

For each import job, after running it, you can see the status of the import job in the following format

• Found (example here) - items found, available for import.
• Duplicates - the number of duplicates items found.
• Imported - the number of items imported last time.
• Cumulative - the total number of items imported by this job since it's active.
• Status (example here) - working | error.

When a new import job is created and run, the items are imported and cached in the database so the same items cannot be imported again to prevent duplicates. So, running the job again will not work the second time. For this case, you can use the Purge & Reset button, which, as its name suggests, will clear the cached data of the import job so items can be imported again using the same import job without creating a new one.

Create and edit import jobs

This can be done in Dashboard -> Feedzy -> Import Posts.

Let's explore the available options within the import job.

1

Sources

Sources

Here you should add the URL(s) of the feed you want to use as a source.

2

Filters

Filters

Posts can be filtered by keywords and date. All the fields in the above image are explained below:

1. Import the posts only if the defined keywords are available in: Title, Author, Description, Full Content.

2. Do not import the posts if the defined keywords are available in: Title, Author, Description, Full Content.

Please note that for both cases mentioned above, including or excluding posts based on the keywords, logical operators are also permitted, examples below. Use comma (,) for OR, and plus (+) for AND

importing only the posts that contain the following keywords: Dark Knight

Dark+Knight

importing only the posts that contain the following keywords: Dark Knight OR Dragonball

Dragonball, Dark+Knight

3. Filter posts by date; this can be done by importing only the posts published in a certain interval, or after a specific date, or before a specific date.

4. Choose how many posts do you want to be imported each time. Feedzy automatically checks the feed and imports only new posts every 60 minutes. So, by choosing 20 posts, you will get a maximum of 20 posts imported every 60 minutes. 

5. Imported posts can also be deleted after a period of time, for example, 3 days. You can set the desired number of days. The plugin also has a global option in this regard, which can be used to specify after how many days all the posts imported by Feedzy will be deleted. If you don't want them to be removed, set the global option to 0 so the value within the import job will take higher priority, then set that one to 0 as well.

6. The option to Remove Duplicates is helpful when multiple sources are added in the same import job, and a particular post is available in two different sources. During the import, Feedzy checks such duplicates and with this option enabled, only one post of that kind will be imported.

7. In case your website is available in multiple languages, Feedzy is compatible with Polylang and WPML and can import feeds as posts on a certain language, which can be chosen in this section at the Assign Language drop-down.

3

Assign Elements - customizing the post' structure by using magic tags

All the fields in detail

Assign Elements

Check the numbers within the screenshot and the explanation below.

1. What type of posts are to be imported. You can only choose one. If you need more, create another import task with the same settings except for this one. 

2. Like any post in WordPress, the imported ones can be assigned to a certain category(categories). Of course, you can change that after the import. This field is for automatically assigning a certain category to the posts that will be imported.

3. Posts status. The new posts can be automatically published, or you can set them to draft so you can check and manually publish them.

4. Post title - choose which information wants to be assigned as the post title. You can add more than one.

5. Post date - this is the date when the post was imported on your site. Item date is the one when the source article was published on the remote website.

6. Post content - this is the structure of the post content. This setting will affect how the posts look on the single post layout on your site, rather than the blog page.

7. Source language - When using the [#item_full_content] magic tag to extract items full content, from a feed that has content in a different language than English, you need to select the corresponding language from the Item Full Content Language selector in order to import the correct content - click for image.

8. External Image URL - by using an external image the featured image of the imported article won't be saved to the Media Library on your website anymore.

9. Featured image - If you want the featured image to be imported fill in this field, otherwise, leave it empty. You can also assign the same image for all of them by adding a URL in this field(In this case, we recommend using the URL of an external image or one from your website Media -> Library).

A default featured image can be used for the feeds that don't have one. Once you finish configuring the import job you can set the fallback featured image in Dashboard -> Feedzy -> Settings, the general tab - click for image. This is an upcoming feature of Feedzy 3.7.5.

10. Post author - inherit the source author to the imported posts, in front-end(archive pages) and back-end(in the Dashboard).

Feed Categories

In this submenu of the Feedzy RSS Agreggator plugin, you can add categories of the feeds.

Step 1: Navigate to Dashboard > Feedzy > Feed Categories.

Step 2: Click on the Add Category button.

Step 3: Enter a category title.

Step 4: Paste the URLs of the feeds that you want to be displayed in this category. You can add multiple sources here comma separated.

Step 5: Click on Publish and check the library to see the changes.

Another interesting fact is that you can check if the feeds are valid from the Action column. Click on the blue button and see the result.

The advantage of this feature is that you can use a feed category that contains one or more sources in the import wizard.

Now that we went through all the steps of the wizard, here is some useful information.

A few limitations based on the license key tiers

Custom scenarios

Giving credit to the original author

How can I add such a link when listing posts on the blog page? This requires custom code. Fortunately, the code is available below.

add_filter('post_link', function($url,$post) {

   if ( is_admin() ) {
      return $url;
   }

   $current_post_meta = get_post_meta( $post->ID, 'feedzy_item_url', true );

   if ( ! empty( $current_post_meta ) ) {
      return $current_post_meta;
   }

   return $url;
}, 99, 2);

function new_excerpt_more($more) {
   $current_post_id = get_the_ID();
   $current_post_meta = get_post_meta($current_post_id);

   if (isset($current_post_meta['feedzy_item_url'][0])) {
      return ' <a href="' . $current_post_meta['feedzy_item_url'][0] . '">Read More</a>';
   }
   return $more;
}
add_filter('excerpt_more', 'new_excerpt_more');

Allow specific HTML tags unstripped

Some feeds might have HTML tags in their content, and Feedzy doesn't import them by default, below is a list of tags that are stripped by the plugin.

'base', 'blink', 'body', 'doctype', 'embed', 'font', 'form', 'frame', 'frameset', 'html', 'iframe', 'input', 'marquee', 'meta', 'noscript', 'object', 'param', 'script', 'style'

It is possible to allow HTML tags unstripped by adding the following line to the wp-config.php file of your WordPress instance.

define( 'FEEDZY_ALLOW_UNSAFE_HTML', true );

Troubleshooting

If something doesn't work as expected, it might worth checking the Feedzy Troubleshooting guide. It covers the first checks that we perform in such cases.

Add canonical URL to imported posts

When importing the feeds as posts, similar pages will be available on at least two websites, the source and yours(others might also import the same posts). To make sure the traffic of the source website is not affected by the search engines leading to your page instead of the original one, the canonical URL options can be enabled in Feedzy's Settings.

This way, the search engines "will know" that the imported posts from the feed is a copy of that content and not the original one.

Integration with the Advanced Custom Fields plugin

This feature is available starting with the Developer plan for the plugin.

Populating custom fields created with the ACF plugin is possible by using the Custom Fields option available in the import setup of Feedzy.

Once the plugin is installed, just create new fields as in the following example. After that, the fields created can be used in the import setup. Below is an example with this particular source, and the dc:creator item being fetched as a custom attribute.

Watch a video on how to use Custom Fields with ACF.