Activating FeedWordPress

Before we begin, make sure you are in the dashboard for your course site. The URL should be [slug].coplacdigital.org/course/wp-admin, with [slug] replaced by your course's actual slug.

From the main administration menu on the left of your dashboard, choose "Plugins." Find FWP in the list of all plugins available to you (plugins should be listed in alphabetical order by default), and click on "Activate."

Notice that once you activate FWP, a new menu option appears in your menu on the left:

Choose that menu item and move on to the next step.

Choosing the new "Syndication" menu item will bring you to a screen with "Syndicated Sites Settings." Unless you've already started to set this up, you'll see that you aren't syndicating any sites yet. Let's change that!

Look to the right side of your screen and see where you can add a "New Source" (i.e., add the feed for a site you want to syndicate). Since you have a handful of sites to add (all of your students' blogs!), choose the "add multiple" option.

This should pop out a larger box where you can enter the RSS feed URLs for your students' blogs.

So, what are the feed URLs for their blogs, anyways? They're actually pretty simple since we have very standard link architecture for COPLACDigital—all you have to do is add /feed to the end of the URL for a student blog, and that's the feed!

So, if John Doe was a student in the hypothetical History COPLACDigital course, the link for his blog's feed would be: http://history.coplacdigital.org/doe/feed.

Now that you know how easy it is, just pop all of the links for your students' blogs into the box and make sure you add /feed to the end of each one (and make sure that http:// is at the beginning). When you've entered them all, hit the blue "Add" button.

Troubleshooting Feeds

Next, FWP will work on detecting the feeds for you. If FWP couldn't find a feed for a site (or found the incorrect feed), verify that you've gotten the URL correct:

1. Make sure it begins with http://
2. Make sure it ends with /feed
3. Make sure you spelled the student's last name correctly!

Look at all of the feeds that FWP has identified for you and verify that they are all ones you want to add. This step is very important—if you misspell a student's name, it's likely that FWP will still find a feed from the general website and want to pull that one in. Uncheck any incorrect feeds that FWP detected, check all of the correct ones, and then hit the blue "Subscribe to selected sources" button. Go back and add the correct feed links (following the above three steps) for any incorrect ones.

Next, update all of the feeds, and your students' posts should begin syndicating on your course site!

Now that you've added the feeds for syndication and manually updated them all, let's set them to update automatically from here on out.

1. Hover over "Syndication" in your dashboard's menu, then click "Feeds & Updates" from the submenu that appears.
2. Find the "Update Scheduling" section and choose the second option: Automatically check for updates before pages load.
3. Click the blue "Save Changes" button on the top right-hand side of the screen.

From this point forward, FWP should bring in any new posts when the blogroll for your course loads.

If you find yourself needing to run a manual update, you can always go to Syndication > Syndicated Sites and run updates there.

Now that you've syndicated your students' sites, they will be added as Users to your site—by default, their role will be as a "Contributor."

You'll also notice that your students' posts will now show up in your own Posts administration screen. This means that you do have the ability to go in and edit the syndicated verions of your students' posts, but we don't suggest doing that.

Notice on your main Posts screen that you now have additional action items for syndicated posts: Zap/Don't Resyndicate and Erase/Resyndicate.

The Zap/Don't Resyndicate option permanently removes the post from your site and prevents it from being resyndicated, while the Erase/Resyndicate option temporarily removes it from your site but allows it be resyndicated later. You might choose the Erase/Resyndicate option if a student accidentally published their post before completing it and FWP syndicated that incomplete version.

If students update the content of their posts, FWP will update the syndicated version of that post on your site. (The exception to this is if a post is further back in the site's feed—by default, RSS feeds serve up to the 10 most recent posts, so if a student goes back and edits a post that is more than 10 posts old, FWP won't update the syndicated version of the post.)