RSS-only content snippets - possible in Ghost?

Using Ghost
1

hey ghost community,

wondering if there’s a way to show specific content snippets ONLY to rss subscribers, similar to what wordpress does with shortcodes.

basically looking for functionality where i can write something like:

regular post content here...

[rss-only]

exclusive content for rss readers

[/rss-only]

more regular content...

the rss-only content would be invisible to web visitors but show up in the rss feed.

wordpress has plugins that do this by checking ⁠is_feed() and conditionally rendering content, but i can’t find anything similar for ghost.

anyone have a solution for this?

1 Like
2

I don’t think there is currently a solution for it. The closest thing I can think of is the fact that certain cards in the Ghost Editor allows you to change visibility of said items based on User Group: Guest, Free Member, Paid Member, Specific Tiers.
For this to work with RSS, the current way Ghost’s RSS Feed works has to be edited. Unless someone has made a tool, you’d still have to modify Ghost to a certain extent. It is not like Wordpress where you can just install “plugins” from the admin dashboard.

2 Likes
3

If you can edit the theme, yes, but it’d be an ugly hack with the #split helper.

2 Likes
4

Thanks for the response! You’re absolutely right that Ghost is much more restrictive than WordPress when it comes to this kind of customization.

5

Interesting! Yes, I can edit the theme. Could you elaborate more on the #split helper approach? Would this ugly hack break anything it shouldn’t?

6

It is the nature of ugly hacks that they might have unexpected effects. :slight_smile:

With that said, here ya go:

(Thanks for the blog post inspiration.)

2 Likes
7

This is incredible work! Thanks for not only answering but actually implementing a solution and writing it up.

While the #split approach is brilliant, it won’t work for me since I need consistency across emails too.

But what if I wanted to add RSS-only content just at the beginning or end of posts, rather than inline? Any suggestions for that scenario?

1 Like
8

Yeah. Custom rss feed and pull the content for it from somewhere else. Maybe a separate post with a slug that adds a -2?