There are plenty of socialnetworks around today, but one of the first ones on the scene wasReddit. Itcollects user-generated news links from all over the web, then users vote to promote their favourite stories to the front page. Users can also follow or create their own subreddits, which are collections of reddit feeds on various topics.
If you haven’t heard of Reddit, here’s a quick introduction to what it’s all about:
Reddit bridges communities and individuals with ideas, the latest digital trends, and breaking news (…okay, and maybe cats). Our mission is to help people discover places where they can be their true selves, and empower our community to flourish.
It encourages its users to share, voteon, and discuss the issues that concern them the most. These range from the most controversial, such as the presidential election in the US, to the most insignificant, such as cat videos. It may not look as fancy as some other social networks, but its certainly one of the most active ones.
How can your site benefit from Reddit?
There are a couple of ways your WordPress site can benefit from reddit.Firstly, you can build a complete website based on feeds from variousreddits. This needs to be done in a way that gives more value to the user than the subreddits within the Reddit site itself do.
Alternatively, you can supplement your current website with reddits about related topics. When we say reddits here, we’re referring to something like this(and as seen in the screenshot below), where the main topic is fitness.
In the belowtutorialwe’re going to look at the whole process of adding a Reddit feeds section to an existingWordPress site. This can be a great way of bringing together a community and showing them what’s being talked about on reddit, besides the other sources around the web.
For example, take sports, or even a specific sport, football. Rather than having to go through all the sections on reddit dedicated to football, those interested in the sport can visit your site and see exactly what’s going on all throughout reddit and the rest of the web. Each reddit link will open up the original thread and they can follow exactly what they want to look at.
To make sure this is clear, we are not building a replica of a reddit site where visitors can up-vote the news they like, we’re creating a community website that will showcase all the latest reddits about a certaintopic, or topics, in one central location.
Step 1: Create a WordPress Site
If you don’t have a news or magazine site already, all you need to make this website fully functional is a hosting account, a domain name of your choice, and a few basic plugins that will help you get started. You can even follow this tutorial on how to set up a news site.
There are plenty of tutorials out there on how to create a WordPress self-hosted website, so we’ll just skip to the important parts of this tutorial.
Step 2: Find the Reddit Feeds You Need
Finding the reddits you want all depends on the topics your site will be covering, so once you search through Reddit and find what you need, actually finding theReddit RSS feedsis super easy.
In most cases, all you’ll have to do is add “.rss” to the end of theexisting reddit URL. For example, for the subreddit of “news”, the URL of the RSS feed would behttps://www.reddit.com/r/news/.rss.
If you want some more detail on how Reddit RSS feeds function, you can have a look at this extensive guideby Reddituserpathogendavid.
Step 3:Install WP RSS Aggregator
To import the RSS feedsand display them we will be using the WP RSS Aggregator plugin. We canstart off with just the free version.
Once installed and activated on your site you will be able to start setting up your feed sources and importing the latest reddits from the topics you selected earlier.
Before moving on to that though, you should have a look at the general plugin settings and choose the setup that you want. From here you can choose whether to set time limits on the imported items, or perhaps limit the total number of reddits imported per feed source.
You can even choose to link the title of each one, set the open link behaviour, show the date, and much more. You can see all the available options in the documentation hereand here.
Step 4: AddYour Feed Sources
Now comes the important (but easy)bit. Adding your feed sources.
Given that you’re using the core plugin alone here, it would make sense to use the Bulk Importfeature of the plugin. All you’ll have to do is go to the Import & Export section and follow the instructions in the Bulk Feed Import area.
It will look something like the screenshot above, where for each feed source you’ll simply be choosinga name and adding the URL of the RSS feed, separated by a comma.
Once you’ve imported them, they’ll all appear in the Feed Sources section and you can modify them individually if you need to. Otherwise, they will keep using the general settings you set earlier.
You’ll also notice that from the moment you create the feed sources, they will start importing the feed items from the RSS feeds. Till now, these are not yet visible to your site’s users. We’ll do that next through the WP RSS Aggregator shortocode.
Step 5: Display the Imported Reddits
As you may have noticed from the RSS feeds I added above, my example site is focusing on the news, from world news to entertainment. Your site may cover any topic of your choice, be it a particular sport, politics or cats. We all know how popular those cat videos have become (and who doesn’t love them?).
On to displaying the feeds. For my site I used a basic free theme that I then modified using theBeaver Builderpage builder. I did this for one reason; it allows me to set up as many content areas as I want on my dedicated pageswhere I’m able to add various shortcodes. This gives me more freedom in creating the design and layout that I want.
Apart from that, I also used a WP RSS Aggregator premium add-on, Categories. This allowed me to create the categorised menu items you’ll see in the next screenshot. By adding a category for each news section I was able to then create a page for each one. Each page simply uses a shortcode with a category parameter that limits the display to the category I want.
Once your pages are complete, the category pages are set up, and the design is finalised, you’re practically all set. If you look at the last screenshot above you’ll notice one thing though; the display of the feed items isn’t the default WP RSS Aggregator display.
The default display has bullet points, no separator lines, and the feed items are closer together. All it took to apply the above styling were a few lines of code you can add to your site in a couple of ways which are explained here. The CSS used for the above look can be found below, and in the documentation here.
li.feed-item > a{ font-size: 16px; color: maroon;}li.feed-item {border-bottom: 1px solid #4f4f4f;padding: 5px 0;}Step 6: Watch the Reddits Flow In
Belowis a simple idea of what your site can look like using the above method, with no added colour and flair. You can let your imagination run wild to create and build the sexiest feed display you can imagine, using the tools you want.
Through the power of WP RSS Aggregator you’ll simply need to sit back and watch the reddits flow in. If anything goes wrong along the way, just contact the support guysand they’ll help you out. WP RSS Aggregator provides stellar support so you have nothing to worry about.
Wrapping It Up
Whichever way you plan to incorporate Reddit into your WordPress site, using the WP RSS Aggregator plugin is one of the easiest ways to do it. It’s a small amount of work that will add a lot more value to your site.
Given the global rise of social media, having such sections on your site can only add value for your visitors, and keep bringing them back for more every day. After all, who doesn’t want one simple location where they can find everything about a topic they’re interested in?
Have you used Reddit feeds with WP RSS Aggregator before? Or perhaps you’ve never thought of adding reddits to your WordPress site? Let us know what you think about it below.
