I use Mailchimp to send emails when I add posts to my Newspaper Theme website. To include excerpts from my posts Mailchimp uses *|RSSITEM:CONTENT|*. According to Mailchimp this information is related to the RSS tag: <description> nested in <item>. Mailchimp says the following: “What it displays: A summary of the RSS item in HTML format, which includes information inside the <description> tag. If there is no <description> tag in your feed, MailChimp will display the information in the <content:encoded> tag”.”
How can I set the RSS description tag so that I can control the excerpt that goes out in the emails? Right now it is just using the first few words of the posts rather than my SEO description or something more useful. Therefore, I assume the RSS description tag is not set.
Thanks for your help.
You can control the excerpt for both modules and RSS from the aptly named ‘excerpt’ field at bottom of each post you do.
If you don’t want to do that you could use Advanced Custom Fields (ACF), create custom data field for RSS; then build a custom RSS feed based on “page” (Google how to build custom RSS for WP); then insert that ACF field in the description tag in your custom RSS.
Probably simpler to manually edit your excerpt field for each post — which is what I do when I have in-post sub-head or some kind of intro text which is not what I want showing in social media, modules and RSS. The excerpt field in WP posts is what populates the description field in your META data, RSS, etc.
Hope that helped!
Chris
Chris,
That is exactly what I want to do, but I am not seeing an excerpt field at the bottom of my posts. Under Post Settings, I have other options such as subtitles, etc. Am I looking in the wrong place?
Thanks again.
Chris,
Problem solved. The excerpt box was set up to be hidden. That fixed the issue with Mailchimp. Thanks so much for your help
Hey, no prob. Been there đ
I’ve gotten lots of help in some forums over the years, so paying it forward, as they say.
