This WordPress plugin allows pre-defined bots to index the full content of your posts through the RSS and Atom feeds. Obviously, it could be useful only to those who serve summaries of their posts.

My personal opinion about the all-time-classic question "Summaries or full content in the feed?" is absolutely: summaries. A publisher shouldn’t force a reader download the whole articles or blog posts, but rather provide an excerpt of his work and let the reader decide if he is interested in reading the full content. I tend to easily unsubscribe from feeds that serve lengthy content. On the other hand, this approach has one big disadvantage. Not only the human readers receive the summaries, but also the various blog search engine bots. This means that only these summaries get indexed by them, reducing the possibilities that your post would be returned in a blog search engine’s results, after searching for terms that do not exist in the excerpt, but somewhere in the rest of the article.

So, I decided to write this small plugin, which lets a pre-defined list of bots read the full posted content through the feeds. It assumes that you serve summaries in your feeds, although this setting has no impact on the plugin’s functionality. You do not have to supply the full bot’s USER_AGENT string, but just a part of it.

Installation

1. Copy bot-allow-content.php to your /wp-content/plugins/ directory.
2. Activate the plugin through the administration panel.

This plugin has effect on the Atom (1.0 and 0.3 are supported), the RDF and the RSS 2.0 feeds. The RSS 0.92 feed serves only summaries.

Configuration

From version 0.4, this plugin provides a configuration page inside the administration panel. Go to:

Administration Panel->Options->Syndication Extra

Follow the instructions from there.

This plugin is Atom 1.0 friendly. For those of you who have hacked the default wp-atom.php file in order to conform with the Atom 1.0 Specification, there is a configuration option within the source code. It has not been added to the configuration page for obvious reasons.

Find the following in the bot-allow-content.php file and set it to TRUE

$IsAtom1 = FALSE;

You can find some guidelines on how to make your Atom feed compliant with the Atom 1.0 specification in my Design the perfect Atom feed for WordPress article.

Note: You can safely de-activate the plugin or switch to serving full content. This way all user agents will comply with your default wordpress settings for syndicated content.

License

This project is released under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

Downloads, Issue Tracking, Support

For the latest releases of Bot-Allow-Content please visit the downloads section of the Bot-Allow-Content Development Portal.

This project has been discontinued.

Changelog

* Wed Nov 01 2006 – v0.6
- When the options where modified in the administration panel, a confirmation was asked. This behaviour has been corrected and the options are saved immediately.
* Wed Oct 04 2006 – v0.5
- Plugin information update
* Sat Jan 15 2006
- Updated to version 0.4
- Addition: A configuration page has been added in the Admin Panel. No editing of the source code is needed.
- Bugfix: Added a check if the list of bots is empty. The absense of it did not produce any errors though.
* Wed Jan 4 2006
- Updated to version 0.3
- The plugin was completely re-written, so that no modifications are required to be done to core wp files, but supports only WP 2 or newer.
* Tue Jan 3 2006
- Initial release v0.2

The Bot-Allow-Content WordPress plugin by George Notaras, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Tags: Plugins, Software, Syndication, Wordpress