Course Management 

Course Setup   Adding RSS Feeds

Moodle supports outgoing (out of Moodle) RSS feeds. This option needs to be enabled by the 

Moodle administrator. Once enabled, RSS is available in the Forum and Glossary modules. 

What is RSS 

RSS is a technology where visitors to your site can choose to have the site send new postings 

to an RSS reader. RSS allows a user to build a custom news service. When users  subscribe  

to your RSS enabled page, they will get new postings from Forums  and/or  new  entries  in          

Glossaries, without having to visit your Moodle. Moodle has an RSS aggregator (collector) for 

these modules.  

The end user does need a way to display the news feed. Windows and Macintosh RSS news 

readers can be found at: 

     http://www.bloglines.com/ (web based) 

     http://www.fastbuzz.com/main.jsp (web based) 

  or you can put RSS into a search engine to find more. 

Why use RSS? If you normally try to keep updated on what is happening on say 10 or 15          

different websites, RSS can help. If all these web pages are RSS enabled, then you can put all 

15 RSS feeds into your RSS news reader, and see all the new things going on in one place. 

RSS in Forums 

When RSS is enabled, two new properties 

in Forum setup appear (Fig. 45).  

     RSS feed for this activity: This turns 

RSS on or off for this forum. When 

set to  None,  RSS is disabled. 

Fig. 45 

When set to  Discussions,  the RSS 

feed will send out new discussions to subscribers. When set to  Posts,  the RSS feed will 

send out any new posts to subscribers. 

     Number of RSS recent articles: This number sets the number of articles that go out via 

RSS. If this number is set to 5, then the 5 most recent articles will be sent to subscribers. 

As new posts (or discussions) get added, the oldest post/discussion gets replaced on the 

RSS feed. If your forum gets a lot of posts every day, you will want to set this number 

high. 

When you enable RSS in your Forum, your users will see an orange RSS button on the main 

page of the forum (in the upper right hand side), as shown in Fig. 46. If you click on the RSS 

button you will get taken to a page that looks something like Fig. 47. 

The stuff on the page is not important to you or your users  (but  Moodle  needs  it!).  For  the           

purposes of RSS feeds, you (or the user) would copy the URL (the web address) from the top 

of the browser, and paste this address into an RSS news reader. Now you (or your students) 

can get the latest posts or discussions along with all the other RSS (news) feeds that you are 

subscribed to. 

Fig. 46 

Fig. 47 

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