Take it from me, and don’t learn the hard way like I did.

There are too many assumptions about how people use Joomla by the developers (I’m referring to 1.0.x here since I have done nothing more than install 1.5 – no testing).  One of the biggest problems I have with it is the RSS feed and it’s insistence on only publishing Front Page published items.  In my opinion, this is a biased and unnecessary decision… but I can’t argue with great free software.

Now, to remedy the problem:

• RD RSS: RD RSS does one thing really well… it allows you to create individual feeds for each content section, but it fails when it presumes that you once again just want “Front Page” items.  Works well with Feedburner, though.
• DS-Syndicate: although I have heard one person say that the relative URLs produced don’t work well with email delivery, I do know that it does parse well through Feedburner, and if you have PRO turned on, then I doubt it matters.  The big improvement here is that DS-Syndicate gives you the option to publish non-Front-Page articles to the feed.

Right now, we have a static front page on the RDL website, but I want to give customers as many options to pull our content through the channels as possible.  If they want to get updates through the website, through a feed reader, or however you want, I want you to have it.  What matters is our end of producing the relative content that informs the consumer.

In summary, I am switching to DS-Syndicate.  The good news is that since I have already changed all of my RSS links to the Feedburner URL, all I have to do is update Feedburner.