14 DAY TRIAL // The importance of RSS feeds to syndicate the web content is well known. You can use RSS feeds with many purposes, such as developing site content, promoting your website, reading news and more.
If you are the owner of a Joomla website, you have many alternatives to develop your website content using RSS feeds. At the same time you can provide to your readers articles via RSS.
There are many Joomla modules or components that parse and display RSS feeds from within your Joomla based site. Slick RSS module allows you to display RSS feeds from five different URL addresses per instance. It also has many other features that can be customized from the Joomla administration panel.
After you have installed the module (I have used Joomla 1.5.0 RC2) then you must explore and setup the display options for the RSS feeds. You will be able to specify the module position in relation to other elements on the same page. It is recommended to setup the RSS cache time to 3600 seconds.
Then you can choose from various available options in module parameters panel: feed title, feed description, number of items to display, RSS feed link target and more. The module also provides UTF-8 encoding, so the default Joomla encoding should be overriden if you display other characters than those existing in English language. You are also allowed to enable tooltips with many customizable aspects, such as font and background attributes.
After you finish the module setup, you should test it by typing some RSS feeds URLs in their correspondent fields (for example: http://webscripts.softpedia.com/backend.xml) and preview the website by clicking the appropriate link situated on the right of the page top. You must test many module positions on the page in order to obtain the desired page aspect and in the same time to provide your visitors the highest page loading speed by adjusting the cache value and the number of feed items.