Summary and Full Text Feeds in WordPress

If an external source’s feed is published through WordPress and normally available as summary text only, a plugin is needed to extend the feed so that two versions are available. Washington State University has created Dual RSS Feed Key for this purpose. In other words, a newspaper may continue to send summary information to  individual subscribers via RSS, while sending the full story to his websiite.

Dual RSS Feed Key is most useful when a WordPress site is configured to display a feed consisting of summaries rather than the full text of each article. This option is configured under Settings -> Reading:

Once Dual RSS Feed Key is installed, an option is available to create a second, full text feed with the addition of a secret key.

Create a secret key of your choosing and type it in the available input box. Once saved, a full text feed will be available for anyone given the address with this secret key.

For example, if a WordPress site was at http://example.newspaper.com and had a summary RSS feed provided by WordPress at http://example.newspaper.com/feed/, and I add a secret key of my-secret-key-abc-123, a second RSS feed will now be available at http://example.newspaper.com/feed/?dual_rss_feed_key=my-secret-key-abc-123.

Visitors to the newspaper site would continue to see summary text when subscribed to the feed. The secret key feed would be used to configure an external source on the WNPA site.

To install Dual RSS Feed Key on your WordPress site, use Plugins inside your WordPress dashboard or go directly to the plugin page.