Its been almost a month now since i moved into MT4, it's a new world of blogging with MT4's new features. I would suggest you do the same with your MT powered blogs.
During my move, i found out that my RSS category feeds were lost. Now, im looking for some ways to restore the RSS Categories. Im not really fun of hacking or messing with my movable type installation and im pretty new to editing with MT templates. With a little bit of help from old blogs posts and the MT4 documentation, i was able to successfully restore my RSS category feeds.
Making a Category RSS feed
Let us start making category rss feeds by going to your blog templates section:
1. On your blog templates, click on your RSS feed template, the one with the file name index.xml
2. Highlight all contents and copy everything inside the template into the clipboard.
3. Click on the shortcut List index templates link on the right.
4. Now you are back to your blog templates page.
5. On the quick filters menu, click on the Archive templates.
6. Create an Entry Listing archive template
7. From the content you copied to the clipboard paste it into the textbox.
8. Assign a meaningful name to your new template, everybody is using Category RSS
9. Save your new template.
10. Create an archive mapping of type Category
11. At the path textbox place in categories/<$MTArchiveCategory dirify="-" $>/index.xml. Please note that movable type will store all the rss feeds into the categories folder you specified. You can also rename it to another name if you'd like to. I'm using rss as my folder for the rss feeds
12. Save your template.
13. Rebuild your Index templates, by clicking on the Publish icon
You can check if your work by visiting your blog thru your favorite FTP client. If categories folder is created then its good to go. Now we can insert the code into our main index template right before the category name. As for me, i placed an image as my rss feed link. try http://www.tildemark.com/rss/
14. Go back to your blog templates root15. Click on the Widgets
16. Click on the Category Archives link.
17. Navigate into the list item
<mt:IfNonZero tag="mt:CategoryCount">
<li class="widget-list-item">
<a href="<MTBlogArchiveURL>rss/<MTCategoryLabel dirify="-">/index.xml"><img src=<mt:StaticWebPath />/images/status_icons/feed.gif alt="<MTCategoryLabel> Category RSS feed" /></a>
<a href="<$MTCategoryArchiveLink$>"<MTIfNonEmpty tag="MTCategoryDescription">
title="<$MTCategoryDescription$>"</MTIfNonEmpty>><$MTCategoryLabel$>
(<$MTCategoryCount$>)</a>
20. Rebuild and Publish your blog. The output should look something similar with my category lists on my main page.
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great tip!
been following through the recipe on MT 4.2 entering the custom archive file path specifier %-C/rss.xml to produce category feeds of the form
blog.example.com/category/rss.xml
and all's well apart from the widget category links..
instead of pointing to blog.example.com/category/ they all point to blog.example.com/category/rss.xml
does this category archive mapping mess with the $MTCategoryArchiveLink$ somehow?
any clues?
@papnormal im kinda confused with what you are saying. ill just shoot in a question, is you blog hosted on the same server with a subdomain? Ive been installing MT on subdomains and i do find it painful getting into the correct directory, you might want to start your investigation on that.
Based on my experience $MTCategoryArchiveLink$ points to blog.example.com/category/rss.xml. No need to specify /rss.xml because its already pointing to the archive page.
Just had the same problem. Before adding this, the category widget created links like blog.example.com/category/index.html. After created Category RSS per the instructions here, the RSS feeds worked just fine but all the category widget links were suddenly changed to point to blog.example.com/category/rss.xml.
Since I don't want people clicking on category archive links and getting RSS feeds instead, I had to change everything back. Apparently somewhere in the process, $MTCategoryArchiveLink$ starts thinking that Category RSS is now the correct link to use. I still want to add category RSS feeds, so any advice would be greatly appreciated.