RSS feed from forum

[treehugger]

Happy New Year everyone.

Our forum used to be active but it's gone deathly quiet lately - partly down to us feeling as though we're banging our heads against a wall with it. I'd like to try to encourage more members to venture in there by having a feed on the members page (like on Datemill homepage) that showed latest posts from a few but not all categories (don't want the one word answers from the Word Games category etc). Is this possible or does it have to be all or nothing?

[admin2]

It's possible. Not straight forward but not difficult either.
1. There are addons for smf to enable rss feeds for each forum. You need to install one of those if you don't have one already. (if you do then you should see the orange icon in firefox's address bar when browsing forums).
2. Then there are sites that can aggregate rss feeds from more sources (http://www.google.com/reader is one example). You need to add the feeds of your desired forums into the reader.
3. The reader can also output rss feeds of the combined feeds you added.
4. Make the feeds addon of Etano read from the reader's feed and the posts will start appearing on the home page.

Alternatively we can read posts straight from smf's database and display them on your home page. This will not involve any rss feed, just good old php programming.

[treehugger]

Thanks Dan - which one do you use here to show forum posts on the main page?

[admin2]

Second one. Our forum is heavily modified so addons have to be installed manually. So I preferred #2.