You log in practically everyday to your WordPress admin panel. The first thing you see is your dashboard and some feeds that the WordPress team feels you should read, which are included by default taken from their planet page. Did you know you can customize it to show feeds that you might actually want to read!

Now the effectiveness of using your WordPress dashboard as a RSS reader is not particularly great as you cannot limit the amount of items that are shown per feed. For instance, I show the last 10 articles in my feed. So by default all 10 will show up anywhere my feed gets subscribed to. But it’s still cool to mess around a little bit, so this is how you do it.

If you run WP 2.0 then simply open up wp-admin/index.php, in a code editor or notepad, and look for the following lines

< ?php $rss = @fetch_rss(’http://planet.wordpress.org/feed/‘ );if ( isset($rss->items) && 0 != count($rss->items) ) {? >

you see the feed link ‘http://planet.wordpress.org/feed/’ change that to whatever feed you like and upload the changed file. You can now see your favorite RSS feed in your WordPress dashboard every morning, or evening…or whenever.

A really cool way to see a multiple number of feeds at once is to use a mash up feed service like Yahoo Pipes to aggregate a bunch of feeds, get the code that Yahoo provides you for the Pipe, insert the code into the same area mentioned above and you can view more feeds at once.

One more thing…

You can also expand or compress the number of feed items you see. Simply look for this line below the code mentioned above -

< ?php $rss->items = array_slice($rss->items, 0, 20);foreach ($rss->items as $item ) {? >

you see where it says ‘items, 0, 20‘ change the 20 to any number you like, higher or lower, and the same amount of feed items will be displayed in your WP dashboard.

Limitations

• If a particular feed shows 10 latest articles then you will see those many in the dashboard as well, so it’s not a replacement for a regular feed reader.

Advantages

• If you don’t read too many feeds then this is an alternative solution for you
• You can customize they way the feeds appear via CSS
• If you work as a WordPress designer, this is a great way to link to your blog, or a help section of your design services, to provide support to your clients. Plus, this way they never forget you – which could mean more sales
• It’s fun messing around with open source software.

For those using WordPress 2.2 and above, you need to look for wp-admin/index-extra.php and modify the same lines shown above.

BTW…I do not recommend you change the WordPress Development Blog feed, you’ll always need that to know about updates.

Subscribe to my full RSS feed.

About the author

Hyder has been blogging for the past two years on this blog. He started Weborithm, his web company, in 2007 and along with designing blogs and websites also releases various web related products.