WP RSS Widget – Issues and Questions

  • summit9

    (@summit9)


    14 years, 11 months ago

    I am new to WordPress, currently pulling 3 of my sites into WP and using Theme Hybrid framework.

    I would prefer to use the WP out of the box widgets whenever possible, as I know it would be supported and I do not have to worry about disappearing developers. I do donate to try and keep this from happening but not everyone does.

    My question is – why does the WordPress RSS Widget sometimes display the site name AND the category right next to the summary in the feed I put in my sidebar? If this information was wrapped in a css class I could hit display: none;. This is not consistent – I switched from Atom to RSS2 and when I cleared out my cache, this was gone.

    Site: Slater Law Office
    Post: Lorem ipsum (a test post)
    Category: Elder Law

    RSS widget displayed the following: short summary read “Slater Law Office Elder Law ResourcesLorem ipsum dolor”. No <span class=”site-title” or anything handy I could set an easy display: none; to. Just ran right up against it with no space even. Eh?

    I was suprised that WP, being a blogging platform originally, wouldn’t have the most incredible, customizable widget for RSS out there. rel-nofollow, summary limit, etc etc should all be easily customized.
    I’ve checked out Better RSS Widget and KB Advanced RSS Widget, and they seem good, but again I’d rather rely on WP out of the box when possible. Pipe dream?

    Right now I’m on RSS2 – no longer does my short summary list like that. I about tore my own head off trying to figure this out. That I have not solved it, just hacked around it does not give me solace. I want to know why this was displaying.

    I’m hunting for documentation on granular customization. I’ve already looked at all the pages one finds while scrolling through the codex. Helpful, but doesn’t seem to address these issues. It just gets me to my feed address and tells me a few nice things about how rss works and some basic customization. CSS I get – wish I could have more css to leverage!

    I am hoping this is merely a case of me not seeing the big giant flashing sign that says “make the wp rss widget not suck by putting this in your functions.php” but I haven’t quite found anything that makes sense. Do you, the reader, know of any excellent wordpress resources that are not found in Docs? Believe me, I’ve looked, and on Google. Otherwise, I’d have to use another widget but I’d really rather not. I’ve had a well researched and rated widgets go bust in the mere 2 months of using WP and I think I only trust widgets made by Justin Tadlock at this point.

    In any case, the widget could use some work. I’d like to know how to make it work better.

    Thoughts?

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