Inside Ning 3 communities, your main community forum is pretty much upfront and center and will be immediately noticable by users. However, forums inside groups can get buried and sometimes forum posts can go unnoticed. In this short tutorial, I will show you how to bring those forum posts to the front of your community. Remember that your main forum categories also produce their own individual RSS feeds as well.
Step One: Get a complete URL list of all of your groups. You can use a tool like list.ly to scrape those URLs out or simply make a list of them in a txt file. List the URLs one per line.
Step Two: Add /forum/feed/all to the end of each URL in order to create a master list of the RSS feeds for all forums inside groups like so
(NOTE: my groups are 'hubs' so yours will most likely be /groups/) Save this text file for future addition of feeds when you add new groups to your site.
Step Three: In order to combine ALL of the RSS feeds into one unique feed you can use a tool like RSSMix or FeedRoller. Copy and paste the entire list in order to combine them into one.
What does this accomplish? Now anytime anyone posts inside any forum inside a group on your Ning community, the feed will update.
Step Four: Go to the Activity Feed section of your dashboard in the backend and paste the url of the new feed into this section as so:
BONUS TIP: You can also bring the individual feeds into your home page (like I have) inside a tab container like so:
BONUS BONUS TIP: Create an announcements feed using The Now Page and use the embed code they provide to embed your feed into Landing Pages on Ning as I have here.
.Also note, you can do the same thing for photos, videos, blogs and more by following the same process. Let me know if you have any questions or if you need help with your community, reach out! Happy to help..
Replies
212 views of this and no one can provide feedback? Is this just way over everyone's head or is it not clear?
This community is supposed to be the role model for other communities....looks like we have a long way to go to get back to how it used to be.
Well, I appreciate it! I'm in the process of migrating to Ning 3 and I'm putting together the site structure now. This could be very helpful. Thank you!