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Q: How do I get FeedWordPress to include the full content of posts, instead of just a short summary or excerpt of the text?

A. FeedWordPress is designed to make use of whatever content is made available to it by the feeds that it syndicates. When source feeds provide full content for posts (as most feeds do), FeedWordPress will import the full content, and display it just as if that content had originally appeared on the aggregator site.

However, for various reasons, some feed producers choose to make only part of their posts’ content available through their syndication feeds. I think this is an awful practice, but people do it nevertheless. (For example, most newspaper sites only provide excerpts or headlines from stories in their news feeds. Popular blogging tools such as WordPress and Blogger typically give users the option of providing full content or abbreviated content in the feed. People do this for many reasons — sometimes because they want to force people using feed readers to click through and give them a page view; sometimes because they are deliberately trying to prevent their articles from being aggregated by third-party websites.) If FeedWordPress only picks up partial content from a feed, it is probably because the feed producer has chosen not to make full content available on their feed. FeedWordPress can only work with the information that the feed producer chooses to make available on their feed.

If you run into a feed that only provides partial content, and you want to get the full content of posts on that feeds, your best bet is to contact the feed producer directly, and to ask her whether or not she would be willing to enable full content on the feed. (Some authors — especially users of Blogger, in my experience — have partial content turned on without realizing it, and would be willing to switch to a full content feed if asked.) If she is willing to switch to full content on her feed, then FeedWordPress will begin syndicating the full content of posts rather than just the excerpts. If she is unwilling to switch to full content on her feed, you should probably respect her wishes and only republish the excerpts she makes available for syndication.

The only other option, if you do not have the co-operation of the feed producer, would be to write — or have someone else write for you — an Add-On module in PHP which would follow the links contained in the feed, retrieve the URL for the full post, and attempt to scrape out the content of the post from that HTML. However, besides the programming work involved in developing a scraper, it’s likely that such an approach would be considered impolite, or even abusive, by the webmasters whose websites you are scraping.

Does that answer your question? If not, use the Talk page to comment on this post or contact me by e-mail for help. Be sure to describe what you are trying to do, and the problems you are running into, with as much detail as possible.

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