New: Microblogging Feeds

We’d like to introduce some new functionality that we have added to our three microblogging themes – Retreat, Cinch & Slanted – which should further improve the niche tumblog-like functionality in these themes.

When we first released these themes, their RSS feeds would display in the default & generic structure in which WordPress outputs the RSS, irrespective of the type of theme you are using. So considering that the content for our microblogging themes were unique (compared to that of a traditional blog & default WP install), we wanted to optimize it accordingly.

If we use Retreat as an example, you will see that the default RSS feed looks like this (browsing with the native RSS reader in Safari):

The Default WordPress RSS Feed

As you’ll see that the RSS feed for that post, just includes the post title, date & content and thus ignores the specific custom fields that we have used to turn a generic post into one that fits the niche requirements of a tumblog. With that in mind, we’ve added a new custom RSS (tumblog) feed that looks like this:

New, Custom Tumblog RSS Feed

With this RSS Feed, we’ve now included the image associated with that post (as it was classified as an image post when published), the category (which links to other posts of similar type), as well as all of the default content bits that are included in the generic RSS feed.