WordPress Category and Author Feeds

All of this information is available in different files, but I couldn’t find it all in one place, so I’m going to post it. If nothing else, I can come back to this post when I forget it myself.

On multi-author blogs I often want to provide author and category feeds as well as the general post feeds. On your blog, you can include these in the author and category listings by adding the appropriate parameters to your wp_list_authors or wp_list_categories calls. (If your template still has wp_list_cats, change it as the function has been deprecated.

But at various times I simply want to type in the actual feed to send to someone, and I don’t feel like going to the blog and finding it, or it may even be one I want, but don’t want to display on the blog. How are these created?

Well, let me give a series of examples. These are taken from the Pacesetters Bible School news blog (using date and name based permalinks) and Running Toward the Goal which uses the php style paramater tags with all the question marks and such.

First, using all the nifty question marks:

Author Henry Neufeld, using user name “admin”: http://running.biblepacesetter.org/?feed=rss2&author_name=admin
Note that you must use the author’s user name. For example, Jody Neufeld is also an author on this blog, and her user name is “Jody Neufeld.” Her RSS feed would be: http://running.biblepacesetter.org/?feed=rss2&author_name=jody+neufeld.
Notice the plus sign replacing the space. This does indeed work.

Category feeds use the category number rather than the bullet in this case, so you’ll have to find that number. For example, to get all posts that are based on the book of Ephesians, use http://running.biblepacesetter.org/?feed=rss2&cat=23.

If you are instead using one of the various permalink systems available, the links will look a bit different, thought all those nifty question marks and ampersands will still work. From the Pacesetters Bible School Newsletter:

Author feed for Doris Murdoch: http://biblepacesetter.org/news/author/doris/feed/. In this case, of course, you can just go get the link from the list of authors because I do have that set to show the author feeds.

Category feed for MP3 programs: http://biblepacesetter.org/news/category/mp3/feed/. This category will list all posts that have an attached MP3 file.