Why Would You Do It?

Once your readers are finished reading an article on your site, what's next? Subscribe to the RSS feed!! Adding a little reminder for people to subscribe to the feed once they finish reading your post is a prime location for such a reminder, and can be a great way to gain regular readers of your blog posts and visitors to your site.

You might have noticed the little reminder to subscribe at the bottom of posts on this site.

The question of how to do this was posed in a comment on another post, so I figured it would be good to write a post on it.

Keep in mind that this trick can be used to add anything you want to the bottom of your posts, not just a feed subscribe box. That I leave up to you.

The Styles Make Smiles

Here's the RSS icon image. The code for styling the box shown on this site is pretty basic, and somewhat generic. You could use it as is or alter it to fit your needs.

.rssbox {
	background: #e4e4e4 url(images/rss-feed.png) no-repeat left top;
	background-position: 20px 7px;
	border: 1px solid #121a24;
	padding:5px 10px 5px 80px;
	margin: 0px;
	font-size: 16px;
	line-height: 23px;
	color: #121a24;
	height:50px;
	width: 472px;
	overflow:hidden;
}
.rssbox a {
	color:#FF7600;
	text-decoration: none;
	font-weight:normal;
	text-shadow:0 1px 0 #FFD563!important;
}
.rssbox a:hover {
	color:#133DF2;
	text-shadow:0 1px 0 #398CFF !important;
}

A Function Or Something

This function can be added to your functions.php file. It is basically just outputting the HTML code which contains the content for my RSS box. You can show whatever you want by putting it within this function..

/* Create RSS Box at bottom of single-posts */
function postBottomBox() { ?>

	<div class="rssbox">
	Get automatic updates! <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/New2WP" target="_blank" rel="bookmark">Subscribe to Our RSS Feed</a> or <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/fb/a/mailverify?uri=New2WP" target="_blank">Get Email Updates</a> sent straight to your inbox!
	</div>

<?php } /* end of RSS box */ ?>

Making It Dance And Sing

You can make it show on the page using two different methods. I personally like to have full control of the order and placement of things whether it's a plugin or a custom function. That is why I use the first example here. You have the ability to place it right where you want to it to display this way.

In your single.php template of your theme, add this below the function the_content() where ever you'd like it to display. This checks if the function exists, in the case that it doesn't for some reason which would break the theme, and then calls the function if it exists.

<?php if (function_exists( 'postBottomBox' )) { echo postBottomBox(); } ?>

The other way you could make it display is by adding a filter to hook into the single template functions.

// Use this to add it to the bottom of the post content
add_filter( 'the_content', 'postBottomBox' );

// Use this to add it just above your comments
add_filter( 'comments_template', 'postBottomBox' );

You don't have as much control using add_filter() though. Many plugins use them to display whatever they display, most commonly, the_content().

This is used by similar post plugins for example, and I'm sure many others. The New2WP Author Box plugin uses the 'comments_template' hook, which I chose to do because at the time I wanted the author bio box to display below all other possible content added by plugins such as similar posts. For me personally and logically, seeing other similar posts would be more interesting as a reader than a box showing a bio about the post I just read. However, using the comments template hook sometimes causes problems with more complex themes.

So What To Do Now??

Well that's a no-brainer.... Subscribe to the Feed!!

Here's a list of our feeds which you may be interested in for those who are only really interested in getting updates for one type of thing and not all new posts and other updates.

Hope this has helped you customize your posts with some nifty additions to the bottom of your posts!! Feel free to comment with any questions or other thoughts below.