Beginning Joomla!® Web Site Development

Chapter 7. Syndication in Joomla! 1.5

Syndication is the process of automatically making your content viewable by third-party websites and/or applications. Many modern websites, weblogs, and web services syndicate their content by making it available in the form of a machine-readable text file in a standard XML format. Several format standards are used, but the most common is known as Really Simple Syndication (RSS).

Like with e-mail newsletters, the main purpose of RSS feeds is to increase traffic to your website by putting your site's content in front of as many people as possible. The benefits of syndication are numerous for both publishers (that's you) and consumers (that's visitors to your site). Using syndication, publishers can make their content available to a wider audience by giving their visitors options for how they consume the content available at the publishers' sites. As RSS readers grow in popularity, more and more of your site's visitors will want to have the ability to access your content from their RSS readers of choice. More than 2000 feed readers are currently available both as online services such as Google Reader, Netvibes, and Pageflakes, and as desktop applications like NewsGator and Firefox Live Bookmarks. Another advantage of syndication is that you also make it possible for other websites to spread your content by displaying your headlines on their site with links back to your site. Joomla! offers another benefit because it not only generates RSS feeds, ...