WordPress doesn’t let you create a feed with posts from multiple categories out of the box. Every taxonomy type will have its own feed created that can be accessed by adding /feed/ to the end of the URL. You could then, theoretically, take all of those and use a third-party tool to pipe those entries into one feed. The other option is to use the feed for your homepage, which pulls in all content. Or you can use something a lot simpler, more powerful and faster, like the WP Custom Feeds Plugin (also known as the WordPress Custom RSS Feeds Plugin) which specializes in creating outbound feeds that contain exactly what you need them to.
The Most Native Solution
Built with support for custom Posts Types and Taxonomies, the WP Custom Feeds Plugin can be used to create an outbound RSS feed that contains posts or other entities from custom post types that span multiple different taxonomies. So if you have a category for Cat, another for Dog and one for Rabbit, and they all contain unique posts, you can pool them together into one feed with the Plugin. You can also choose to build a feed based on content created by specific authors, or content that has imagery that’s at least a specific size (useful if you’re syndicating content as most platforms have image size requirements).
If you want to build a feed that only contains specific articles on your website, you can choose to curate by Post ID (we’re working on adding a site search feature so you can search for posts by title or category and manually select them). But something powerful that’s available now is the option to add external URLs to feeds, which is helpful for curating content from around the website, pulling in content from a subdomain or a partner website. You can manually specify the URL that should be included in the feed, the headline and description, and even the image. You could use this to link manually to posts on your website too.
You also have the option to rewrite the description for all of the entries automatically added to the feed, calling in entities like the post title, excerpt, and author name. For example, if you have a website that contains a list of bakeries in New York City, you could build a feed to send elsewhere. The title of each listing may be the bakery’s name, and you could customize the description to read something like: “We’ve just added {title} to our list of the best bakeries in New York City. Head over to Bakery World to learn why.” The possibilities are really endless.
Creating a feed using the WP Custom Feeds Plugin is easy. It’s as simple as checking a view boxes and updating your Permalink Settings. We are working on removing the need to update Permalink Settings but that takes a little bit of time. Our aim was to create something functional to bridge this gap for a project we were working on, so it was built to be scrappy, and is now evolving into its own project. That’s why the design isn’t amazing. But we’re working on that too. You can currently collapse feeds once you’ve created one which is useful for handling multiple, but we’re working on improving the flow and adding a search feature.
But they’re minor details in the face of things: You can use the Plugin to create truly custom outbound feeds in WordPress, and that’s the most important thing. We’re working on restricted-access free version to allow people to take it for a spin, or let people who only need a feed or two create one for free without all the added bells and whistles like External URLs and Image Filtering, but that’s coming down the line. For now, we’re only supporting a paid version of the WordPress Custom RSS Feeds Plugin, and that’s because we want to commit all our time to making that perfect, before we roll out a lightweight free version.
A Visual Look at the Plugin
Here’s a brief look all of the different features the WP Custom Feeds Plugin has to offer:
By far the most exciting thing about this Plugin is that we want to build it with you. As we mentioned earlier, this was initially created to fill a void in a project we were working on. But we’re long past that, and now it’s here to help everyone. If there’s a feature you’re dying to see supported, please do let us know and we’ll see if it fits with the roadmap. Just keep in mind: This plugin is a solution for outbound feeds only, and will not support ingesting content (there are plenty of other solutions out there for that). We can also build something a little more bespoke using the current Plugin as the foundations if you have a very specific need too.