FV Feedburner Replacement Installation Guide

Installation

Install the plugin using WordPress or copy the plugin directory into your WordPress plugins directory (usually wp-content/plugins) and activate it in WordPress admin panel.

Read below to find detailed instructions for:

• plugin activation and checking the feeds
• what to do if you use caching plugins
• how to configure the plugin

Activating and checking the feed

Once the plugin is installed, you will see the update message:

FV Feedburner Replacement Activation Message 

It’s important to clear your browser cache, clear your WordPress cache (special steps below) and check these links:

1. First one points to the plugin settings page (also accessible through menu). It’s important to put in your newsletter signup form code – if you are not going to use the default one (read further for usage details).
2. Second link will open the feed address and should redirect you to the Subscription page. You should be seeing your template with “{your site name} feeds” page appearing, you can see how it looks like in Twenty Twelve (default template in WP 3.5) on the picture below:


Default subscription page

3. Third link points straight to w3.org feed validator with your feed link as a parameter, so you can see instantly if your feed is still working for feed readers. It might appear with some warnings (depending on what plugins you use and what they do to the HTML), the important thing is that the code preview says:

   <code><?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
   <rss version="2.0" ...</code>
   

   
   w3.org Feed validator output

Cache plugins

If you are using a caching plugin, you need to make sure feeds are not being cached. This is mainly important in WP Super Cache as it caches feeds by default. You should see this warning if you have this plugin:

WP Super Cache Warning

You need to make sure that in Settings -> WP Super Cache -> Advanced the “Feeds (is_feed)”option is on, see the screenshot:

WP Super Cache – Excluding feeds from caching

If you use Hyper Cache, this setting is off by default, but you should still check it:

Hyper Cache – “Feeds caching” needs to be off

Configuration

This plugin works out of the box – that means there is already some newsletter signup code which works. Just go to Settings -> FV Feedburner Replacement. And you can see it.

FV Feedburner Replacement Settings Screen

Here’s a description of the fields:

• Title – applies to the subscription page
• Meta Description – applies to the subscription page
• Enter your newsletter/feed subscription code here – enter your form code here. It can be HTML for any plugin a plugin shortcode or HTML from any of external newsletter service provides (MailChimp)
• Change CSS
• Show a list of standard WordPress feed URLs – adds the “Pick the feed for subscription” section
• Show comments feed link in the list
• Show a list of all category feed URLs

Settings for Feedburner

Enabling this will make your moving away from Feedburner easier. It tweaks Feedburner feed is following ways:

• it places “Please resubscribe on {link to your real feed} to get the latest news!” at the start of the posts – this can be customized
• it shortens the articles in the feed to just excerpts, to force them to click to your site
• when users click through to your site, they will see the subscription form from the plugin setting with a link to the real article

Above applies to Feedburner only. Make sure you clear your cache plugins after doing this and that they are set the right way, read instructions here.

Using the default form

This form stores the data in the same table as the Newsletter and Newsletter Pro plugins by Satollo. Just install any of these plugins at any time and subscribers collected by FV Feedburner Replacement will be there.

All settings are located in “Default subscription form settings”, including all the messages which appear on the site or in confirmation emails. It also contains CSV export, so you can start using the plugin and later export your fresh list and put it into a different service.

Our system uses confirmation emails, so we suggest you do a test subscription on one of your emails to make sure you get the confirmation email and it works.