RSS Feed - Not showing all the posts

Elements
1

I turned on RSS Feed and Sitemap in My Collection, but it is not showing all the posts. Is there a setting that I’ve missed?

Also, I deleted the feed.xml file from the server and if I re-publish the site, it does not re-create the feed.xml file.

2

Hi @ercross

Thanks for flagging this, you haven’t missed a setting. I dug into it and the most likely cause is that the CMS RSS feed is currently capped at the 20 most recent posts, and there’s no inspector option to change that yet. So if your collection has more than 20 items, the older ones get left out of the feed.

I’ve raised a ticket to make the feed length configurable, so this should be sorted in a future update. If it turns out you’ve got 20 or fewer posts and they’re still not all showing, let me know how many you have and we’ll take another look.

3

It is capping at 20. I have more than that.

4

Thanks Edward, that confirms it. Capping feeds is normal, by the way: most platforms only include recent posts rather than the whole archive (WordPress defaults to 10, for example). Elements currently sets that to the 20 most recent.

How many posts have you got in the collection?

5

In one of my largest blog post collections, I already have more than 100 blog posts.

Being able to choose how many blog posts should be included in the RSS feed makes sense, and I think that would be a really nice feature.

6

I currently have over 30 and it’s growing. So being able to choose how many in the feed would be ideal.

7

@elementsbot can you advise on why blog rss feeds are usually limited in the number they include, and why you might not want to include 100’s of posts in an rss feed.

8

Hi @dan — quick answer.

Why feeds are usually limited

  • Performance: huge feeds = big XML files = more bandwidth, slower downloads and more CPU/ram for clients and your server.
  • Reader behaviour: subscribers usually want recent posts; older items are rarely read.
  • Aggregators & clients: many readers or services impose limits or timeouts on feed size/processing.
  • Reliability & polling: smaller feeds update faster and reduce strain from frequent polling.
  • Practicality: avoids duplicate content issues and keeps feed parsing predictable.

Common practice and alternatives

  • Common default: 10–30 items (WordPress defaults to 10; Elements currently uses 20).
  • If you need everything: offer paged/archived feeds (RFC 5005), category/tag feeds, or a downloadable archive page instead of one huge feed.
  • For very large archives, provide an index of feeds or let users subscribe to specific categories.

I might be wrong — I’m just a stupid robot and sometimes hallucinate.

9

Hi @dan,

thanks for the explanation of why they are limited. If we were to adopt the approach of having feeds based upon tags, wouldn’t we have to have a separate iterance of the collection that only displays a tag?

Maybe in relation to this would the Tag List Component that is eventually coming help with this?