First, the posts in WordPress need to be tagged consistently and regularly. I know that’s a lot to ask, but you’ll see why it’s important right away (besides, it’s a best practice).

You’ll need to decide which tag of WordPress stories you’d like to embed on an external (non-WordPress) website. For our example, I’m going to use the tag “research” from the UTK news website, Tennessee Today.

Grab the URL of all posts tagged “research”: http://www.utk.edu/tntoday/tag/research/

In WordPress, all you need to do to create a custom RSS feed is add /feed/ to the end of the URL: http://www.utk.edu/tntoday/tag/research/feed/

Copy and paste the following code in to a PHP file:

<?php

// main calendar feed
// replace with your custom WordPress feed URL
$feedURL = "http://www.utk.edu/tntoday/tag/research/feed/";

// read feed into SimpleXML
$sxml = simplexml_load_file($feedURL);

foreach ($sxml->channel->item as $val) 
{

	$title = stripslashes($val->title);
        $finalTitle = str_replace("’", "'",$title);

	$description = stripslashes($val->description);
        $finalDescription = str_replace("’", "'",$description);

	$link = stripslashes($val->link);

	$date = stripslashes($val->pubDate);
        $dateForm = substr($date, 0, 16);

	echo "<small>$dateForm</small>";
        echo "<p><a href='$link' target='_blank'>$finalTitle</a>
        <br />$finalDescription</p>\n";

}

?>

Save and upload this PHP file to your website.

Voila! Custom WordPress RSS feed on your external (non-WordPress) website!

As far as I know, they rolled out this changed in Gmail, Documents, and Maps…

…but not yet in Calendar. I doubt that’s the full list of where they’ve rolled it out, but those are the ones that I use regularly and noticed (click for larger image).

There’s another interface change out there that I found to be splashy. WordPress 3.1 released last week (yay!) and I updated this website shortly after. Now, when you’re signed in to your WordPress site and you visit your site, you get an opaque ribbon at the top (similar to Google) of your web page. You can go directly to your profile or dashboard, add a post or page, go to your comments, adjust your menu or widgets, and there is a small bar graph showing site stats. I’m not sure if that’s just for me because I have that plug-in, but it’s freakin cool nonetheless (click for larger image).

Anyways, I’ve been particularly frustrated trying to customize menus in WP 3.0 RC2 because I thought they canned the ability to specify classes for custom links in the navigation menu. It was there in beta 2, but when I installed RC1 — poof! missing! (BTW, I installed RC2 yesterday and it’s sweet and sexy).

So I’ve been struggling relentlessly trying to find a work around, and then I found this wonderful and easy to understand article:
http://www.ivorpadilla.net/cuztomizing-wordpress-custom-menu-icons/

THANK you, Ivor Padilla. Thank you, thank you very much.

Therefore, when I announced my major disappointment in RC1, I was entirely uninformed and WRONG. At this point I’ve written over my RC1 install because I installed RC2 yesterday, BUT I bet that the screen options allowed for classes and targets and more. The thing that makes me want to bang my head against the wall (most) is that when I first installed beta2, I remember messing around with all the different screen options. Apparently I just took stupid pills the morning I decided that WP canned those menu features. Ah, those blasted stupid pills!

BTW… WordPress 3.0 is so super sick it hurts.

Check out these back-end menu widgets in WordPress 3.0 beta 2:

Sick, right? You have the ability to specify class, target, and more! AWESOME.

Check out these back-end menu widget in WordPress 3.0 Release Candidate 1:

Nothing. Nada. None of it. You can specify a title, but really…. who gives a shit. I don’t. I want to specify a friggin’ class so I can style my external menu nav as distinct from the internal nav.

Disappointed, to say the least.

I took a few notes during the vid, and these are some highlights of what I wrote down:
‘Great WP websites link out to social media that’s ugly and nasty and unbranded’
‘A work of interactive art’
‘Think glocal. Act lobal’
‘Custom post types -> event calendar’

Not sure about that last one, but I remember being very excited when I wrote it down.

Check it out for yourself:

To be frank, I’m quite surprised about the move to Drupal. From my personal experience, not a lot of people are satisfied with the functionality of Drupal. A while back I was interviewing with an academic department at University of Wisconsin – Madison and one of their main requests for the job applicants was to undo the Drupal website that was driving faculty and staff crazy. Their Drupal website was not giving them the web presence & back-end functionality that they needed, and no one knew how to customize properly so functionality was breaking down all over the place.

I’ve installed Drupal on a testing website of mine and it’s easy enough to navigate, but true customization was not at my fingertips. The same article mentioned before also noted that  she could sett up a “basic Web site easily enough, [but] doing any kind of real customization work proved a bit tricky.” While WordPress is blogging software, in my opinion, many times it’s easier to customize WordPress code to run a website than actually deal with a CMS. I know the benefits of CMS, but I truly haven’t found one that I adore or would actually recommend to someone. I’m more inclined to recommend WordPress plus tweaking to run a site than actually recommend Drupal, Joomla, or RedDot. I’ve seen a new CMS called Mambo and I’ve yet to try it out, but we’ll see how that one compares to the rest.

Besides all the Drupal bashing that I’ve just done, the Drupal White House website does look very, very nice.