Send Images to RSS vs TheGridIndex RSS Importer

Send Images to RSS bridges the gap between large websites and small emails, by replacing images in your feed with smaller, email friendly images, and attempting to add markup which email clients can handle. Between larger monitors, retina screens, and better image optimization, the images we serve up on our websites are larger than they’ve ever been. RSS to email services such as MailChimp, however, are constrained to what email clients can display, which is small, small, small. And although it’s possible to try to style images with a max-width in your emails, not all clients will honor it (I’m looking at you, Outlook). Send Images to RSS makes it easy to create beautiful, email friendly RSS campaigns, with minimal setup required, regardless of your feed setup. Full Text RSS Feeds If your site’s RSS feed is set to Full Text, this plugin makes sure your emails look more like your website: Replace overly large images with email friendly size images. Convert galleries from thumbnails to full width images. Add email friendly styling/alignment to your images. Summary Text Feeds If you’ve used Summaries as your RSS feed settings, this plugin has not been for you. Until now. As of 3.0.0, Send Images to RSS brings the awesome to you, too. Here’s the magic for your Summary feed: Add the post’s featured image to your excerpt. Choose the size and alignment. If no featured image is set, the plugin will use the first image uploaded to the post. Set a custom length for your RSS summary/excerpt. Pick the number of words you want your summary to have, and the plugin will aim for that, but with the added bonus of making sure the final sentence is complete. If you add a manual excerpt to your post, because you like to have full control, the plugin will properly use that instead. Automatically add a custom “read more” link to the end of every post summary, to keep your feed pointed back to your site. Known (non)Issues This plugin should work with any theme. Some themes and plugins do modify the feed for their own purposes. Where possible, I’ve tried to account for them: For summary feeds, the Yoast SEO RSS link is removed (the full text feed and front end output are not changed). For summary feeds, the excerpt filter added by the Woo Canvas theme is removed (the full text feed and front end output are not changed). For summary feeds, this plugin will replace the image settings for Display Featured Image for Genesis for versions 2.3.0 and later (because this plugin is smarter). If you’re using Display Featured Image for Genesis 2.2.2 or lower, this plugin will concede graciously. But you should update, please. For full text feeds, this plugin will not duplicate featured images if they are being added by Display Featured Image for Genesis–you will want to disable that feature in Display Featured Image for Genesis. NOTE: it is up to you to check that your feed output is still working, especially in your email system of choice, once it’s installed. I’ve attempted to set it up to handle XHTML or HTML5, and function even if your feed is wonky, but please double check, and let me know if you have issues, and if so, what specifically they are. Props Special thanks to Gretchen Louise for her summary feed contributions. Spanish translation offered by Web Hosting Hub

TheGridIndex RSS Importer pulls headlines from external RSS feeds into WordPress as posts. Designed to pair with The Grid Index theme but works as a standalone importer with any theme. About the name. “TheGridIndex” is a coined product name owned by Fifth Avenue Photographic (the plugin author) and is also the name of a companion WordPress theme by the same author. The plugin is not affiliated with any unrelated project, dataset, or service that happens to share the words “grid” or “index” in its name. Use of the companion theme is optional — the plugin works as a standalone importer with any theme. Features: 47-feed curated catalog (News, World, Tech, Business, Science) — toggle on with one click Custom feeds — paste any RSS URL on the Feeds tab Per-feed check interval (5 min / 15 min / 30 min / hourly) Configurable post status (publish / draft / pending) Granular post categories — feeds map to News/World/Tech/Business/Science alongside the catch-all RSS category Featured image extraction from feed enclosures, media:thumbnail, media:content, or first content image Minimum image width filter Persistent GUID dedupe ledger — re-runs never create duplicates, even after posts are deleted Duplicate detector with bulk merge tool Feed health monitoring — flags feeds that fetch successfully but import nothing (silent failures) Embedded knowledge base with 15 FAQ entries Per-post source attribution meta for theme integration When The Grid Index theme is active, imported posts automatically display: Source attribution chip in the article hero “Read at [Source]” CTA button below the hero The “Hide comments on imported RSS posts” Theme Option (if enabled) takes effect External services This plugin is an RSS feed importer. To do its job, it must connect to external (third-party) RSS feed URLs that you choose to enable. No feed is fetched until you explicitly enable it — either by toggling a feed on from the Catalog tab or by pasting a custom RSS URL on the Feeds tab. If you enable no feeds, the plugin makes no outbound requests. What is sent, when, and why: When a feed you have enabled is due for a check (per the global cron and that feed’s individual interval — 5 min / 15 min / 30 min / hourly), or when you click “Import Now,” “Force re-import 24h,” or a per-row “Fetch” button, the plugin makes a standard HTTP GET request from your WordPress server to the feed’s URL. That request includes: The feed URL you enabled (target of the request). A standard browser-style User-Agent header (used because some publishers’ WAFs reject WordPress’s default User-Agent). Standard HTTP headers (Accept, Accept-Encoding) added by the WordPress HTTP API. Your server’s outbound IP address (visible to the publisher in their access logs, as with any HTTP request). No personal data about your site visitors is sent. No analytics, no telemetry, no user-identifying information. The plugin does not phone home to the plugin author or to any service the author controls. Outbound caching. Successful and failed fetches are cached locally on your WordPress site via the standard SimplePie/WordPress transient cache to reduce redundant requests. No fetched content is sent off your server. Custom feeds you add. If you paste your own RSS URL into the Feeds tab, the plugin fetches that URL on the same schedule. You are responsible for ensuring you have the right to import from that source and for reviewing that source’s terms. Curated catalog publishers. The plugin ships with a catalog of 47 RSS feeds offered as a convenience. Each publisher operates independently of this plugin and its author. Use of each publisher’s feed is governed by that publisher’s own terms of service and privacy policy. How to reach each publisher’s current legal pages. Each publisher operates their own legal pages on their own domain. The URLs publishers use for these pages change periodically — they reorganize sites, migrate to new help centers, move to consolidated parent-company legal portals (e.g. Condé Nast, Yahoo, NBCUniversal, Dow Jones, Disney/Paramount). Rather than hard-code per-publisher URLs that go stale, this readme lists each publisher’s home page, which is the canonical, stable entry point. Every publisher’s site footer carries links labeled “Terms” / “Terms of Use” / “Terms of Service” and “Privacy” / “Privacy Policy” / “Privacy Notice” that go to their current legal pages — those footer links are the publisher’s own source of truth and stay current as the publisher updates their policies. If you want to review a publisher’s terms before enabling their feed, open that publisher’s home page and use the footer links. Reasoning for this presentation choice: an earlier version of this readme hard-coded direct terms/privacy URLs for every publisher; within a single review cycle, 12 of those URLs already 404’d because publishers had moved their legal pages. Pointing to home pages eliminates this rot for both users reading this readme today and for any future reviewer. The table below lists every publisher the plugin can connect to (catalog feeds plus the activation-time starter feeds), grouped by category: News The New York Times — https://www.nytimes.com/ BBC — https://www.bbc.com/ The Guardian — https://www.theguardian.com/ NPR — https://www.npr.org/ Al Jazeera — https://www.aljazeera.com/ Google News — https://news.google.com/ USA Today — https://www.usatoday.com/ The Washington Post — https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ABC News (US) — https://abcnews.go.com/ (operated by Disney; legal pages are reached via the Disney/ABC site footer) CBS News — https://www.cbsnews.com/ (operated by Paramount; legal pages are reached via the CBS/Paramount site footer) Politico — https://www.politico.com/ NBC News — https://www.nbcnews.com/ (operated by NBCUniversal; legal pages are reached via the NBC/NBCUniversal site footer) The Hill — https://thehill.com/ ProPublica — https://www.propublica.org/ Time — https://time.com/ Bloomberg (Politics and Technology feeds) — https://www.bloomberg.com/ LA Times — https://www.latimes.com/ Tech TechCrunch — https://techcrunch.com/ The Verge (Vox Media) — https://www.theverge.com/ (legal pages governed by Vox Media; reached via the Verge site footer) Ars Technica (Condé Nast) — https://arstechnica.com/ (legal pages governed by Condé Nast; reached via the Ars Technica site footer) Wired (Condé Nast) — https://www.wired.com/ (legal pages governed by Condé Nast; reached via the Wired site footer) Engadget (Yahoo) — https://www.engadget.com/ (legal pages governed by Yahoo; reached via the Engadget site footer) Hacker News — https://news.ycombinator.com/ (feed served via the hnrss.org community bridge — bridge home: https://hnrss.github.io/) 9to5Mac — https://9to5mac.com/ MIT Technology Review — https://www.technologyreview.com/ ZDNet (Red Ventures) — https://www.zdnet.com/ (legal pages governed by Red Ventures; reached via the ZDNet site footer) Business Financial Times — https://www.ft.com/ Harvard Business Review — https://hbr.org/ Fast Company — https://www.fastcompany.com/ (legal pages governed by Mansueto Ventures; reached via the Fast Company site footer) Forbes — https://www.forbes.com/ Wall Street Journal (Dow Jones; feed publishes headlines, full articles paywalled) — https://www.wsj.com/ (legal pages governed by Dow Jones; reached via the WSJ site footer) MarketWatch (Dow Jones) — https://www.marketwatch.com/ (legal pages governed by Dow Jones; reached via the MarketWatch site footer) CNBC (NBCUniversal) — https://www.cnbc.com/ (legal pages governed by NBCUniversal; reached via the CNBC site footer) Science Science Daily — https://www.sciencedaily.com/ NASA (US government, public domain content) — https://www.nasa.gov/ World Deutsche Welle — https://www.dw.com/ France 24 — https://www.france24.com/ CBC News (Canada) — https://www.cbc.ca/news ABC News (Australia) — https://www.abc.net.au/news AI / Vendor blogs (starter feeds, not in the curated 47-feed catalog) OpenAI — https://openai.com/ Google AI Blog (Alphabet) — https://blog.google/ Hugging Face — https://huggingface.co/ Listing above does not imply endorsement or affiliation. If a publisher you want to use is not in the catalog, you can add their RSS URL manually via the Feeds tab; the same disclosure (HTTP GET with browser-style User-Agent) applies.