Making the Mambo RSS Feed Search Engine Friendly

The Mambo CMS has a built-in module for content syndication through RSS, OPML, ATOM, and other feed types. Unfortunately, it is configured to push new content URLs without the search engine-optimized (SEO) modification. So while your content URLs may be fine, anyone who links to your site from your feeds will be using a dynamic, non-SEO link. Here's how to hack the component to make it work properly in Mambo 4.5.4.

Open up the /components/com_rss/rss.php file with a text editor and skip down to line 212. You should see this:

$item_link = $mosConfig_live_site .'/index.php?option=com_content&task=
view&id='. $row->id .'&Itemid='. $mainframe->getItemid( $row->id );

That's the line that forms URLs for your content. The standard, built-in Mambo SEO function changes this URL to something simpler that search engines can more easily follow and index. If you're using this function (and not some other third-party SEO/SEF hack), you will have to replace the above line with this one in order to get SEO URLs in your feeds:

$item_link = $mosConfig_live_site .'/content/view/'. $row->id
 .'/'. $mainframe->getItemid( $row->id );

Save and close the file, then check your feeds to make sure the addresses are being written properly.