2005 / November 10^th/ Getting all of your feed subscribers to FeedBurner (Wordpress)

Are you looking for how to redirect all of your subscribers to FeedBurner in WordPress? Did you find out that you have a large portion of people still subscribed to wp-rss2.php instead of /feed? Here’s a solution I took that actuallly gave me an accurate representation of my subscribers.

Step #1: Download and install Steve Smith’s Plugin

This is a sinch. Steve is a great plugin developer because he seems to match exactly the demand. Great documentation, easy to setup. Install it, get FeedBurner going and then move on to step 2.

Step #2: Hacking

Ugh. This was the first time I had to actually hack core WordPress files. Not a good solution in the least, but here’s my solution (for what it’s worth). If anyone’s got a better (read: plugin) solution to this, let me know. I couldn’t use any of the hooks that I know of due to how WordPress handles feeds.

1. Open up wp-feed.php in the root of your WordPress install. Find the filenames like wp-rss2.php and change them to: wp-rss2-feed.php.
2. Now, rename wp-rss2.php to wp-rss2-feed.php.
3. Create a new file, called wp-rss2.php and put in the code below.
4. Rinse and repeat for wp-atom.php, or whatever other feeds you would like to do this on.

Redirection code:

<?
header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
header("Location: /feed/");
exit();
?>

Basically what we’re doing is trasfering everyone on wp-rss2.php over to /feed, which is then redirected via .htaccess (by Steve’s plugin) to FeedBurner. To my site, this increased by FeedBurner subscription four fold, due to the majority of my subscribers being subscribed to the old wp-rss2.php when my site first launched.

In theory, this should move all of your slackers over to /feed/ if their feed reader is intelligent. Unfortunately, it does not seem to affect Bloglines users (aside: does anyone know how to change the location of your feed in Bloglines?).

Drawbacks

Yep, it’s not clean. You’ll have to re-edit your WordPress files each time you upgrade to keep redirecting them. Good news is if you upgrade you won’t actively break anything, it just won’t be redirecting all of your visitors to FeedBurner.

Also keep in mind you’ll have to change every instance of wp-rss2.php in your code. Many plugins rely on this location (like wp-cache) - so it’s a good idea to run a Find All on your WordPress install.

Here’s hoping the next version of WordPress allows you to move your feeds around by restructuring some files and adding some additional hooks!

1. 

   Wired

   November 14^th | #

   Changing bloglines rss feeds is cake. Catch me later via email or cell or something.

2. 

   Encanycle

   December 9^th | #

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9. 

   zapalyt

   December 17^th | #

   izvenite no nam nado sdelat test
   vi ved ne bydete protiv admini

10. 

    Alex

    January 14^th | #

    thanks for this hack
    but I am wondering if is there any possibility to modify htaccess file?
    theoretically we can add a rule to check user agent and if it is not a feedburner agent, redirect feed url to feed burner