Confessions of a Six Figure Professional Blogger

How To: Putting the Full Blog Post Into An Aweber Blog Broadcast

July 2, 2008 | Webmaster Crap

OK, time for a quick, technical post. I post these as much for myself for later reference as I do readers.

PROBLEM: Aweber has a blog broadcast tool which does a great job of sending your blog posts out via email. Problem is that it takes the content of that post from the DESCRIPTION field in the RSS feed. This means that, out of the box (so to speak) you cannot send anything but excerpts of your blog posts via email.

Personally, I find this to be a rather asinine limitation on Aweber’s part, but oh well.

You have two options:

  1. Copy/paste your entire blog post into the excerpt field manually every time you make a post.
  2. Hack the RSS feed so that the full post goes into the DESCRIPTION field in the feed.

I chose the latter, and this hack is for Wordpress.

In the feed-rss2.php file, located in the wp-includes folder, find the following code:

<?php if (get_option('rss_use_excerpt')) : ?>
<description><![CDATA[<?php the_excerpt_rss() ?>]]></description>
<?php else : ?>
<description><![CDATA[<?php the_excerpt_rss() ?>]]></description>

Basically, whether you choose full or partial feed in Wordpress options, you’re going to get the excerpt field in that description field. Change the above code to this:

<?php if (get_option('rss_use_excerpt')) : ?>
<description><![CDATA[<?php the_excerpt_rss() ?>]]></description>
<?php else : ?>
<?php /* This hack put in to put full posts into description field for Aweber */ ?>
<?php /*<description><![CDATA[<?php the_excerpt_rss() ?>]]></description>*/ ?>
<description><![CDATA[<?php the_content() ?>]]></description>

This will put your content into the DESCRIPTION field in the RSS2 feed.

And like magic, Aweber will pick up the full body of your post and send it out to your list.

If you enjoyed this article, you might also like...

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  4. Switching To Aweber – Part 1
  5. If You Could Go Full-Time With Your Blog, Would You?

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Enter email:

  • Much easier solution, as previous commenter pointed out: Just replace aweber's automatically-generated {!rss_item_description} in the aweber template (which, as you say, only gets the excerpt) with {!rss_item_content}. Problem solved.
  • This post was written back in 2008, so that option didn't exist back then. Good to see it does now. :)
  • I found this page on AWeber's knowledge base called "How Can I Send Entire Posts in My Blog Newsletters?". http://www.aweber.com/faq/questions/420/How+Can...

    I did gave it a try for my blog broadcast and it works as it should. No need for plugins and hacking. Even images and links in the post works.

    Now I have a dilemma. Do I send the full post or just the summary to my subscribers? Hoping someone can tell me the pros and cons of each.
  • I am using 2.8.4 and had no trouble doing the hack you describe to the RSS2 file - and voila! The full post in all its glory. You are, in fact, a star. I have been trying to get help on this for two days and having a solution like this is so incredibly helpful. Thanks!
  • Wordpress 2.8 doesn't have an RSS2 file anymore.

    Got a new hack yet?

    Thanks!
  • Dude, I been looking all over for this. I made the change, do you know of a way to send yourself a test blog broadcast? I know you can do it with regular messages, but not blog broadcasts?

    Thanks for the tip
  • Thanks so much for this hack. I spent a WHOLE day sifting through Google, Wordpress docs and Aweber help files looking for a solution to this. Unbelievable!

    In WP 2.7 the 'Full Text' or 'Summary' feature simply does not work! No matter what I tried (from about 20 tests), I could not get the full content (including images and links) to display in my feed.

    I finally found a clunky solution by copying the post into the Excerpt window, and setting WP to 'Summary'. However, because the Excerpt window strips out all the HTML I had to export to Dreamweaver, add in all the HTML tags then copy and paste back into WP!

    This hack (if it works) will save me having to do this for EVEY post! Thanks very much.

    BTW, has anyone tested this successfully yet in WP 2.7?

    cheers
    Andrew
  • coming from a long time aweber user, it might be worth your while to change over to getresponse very soon. the new pricing model they are implementing is by far better than aweber.

    for 20$ a month aweber lets you have 500 subscribers, but getresponse lets you have 10000...just a thought. will reduce my bottom line a bit :)
  • Darin Blue
    I agree with Tim's comment above, I'm not sure about what this does to SEO and have concern about that.

    Please give some input on that...

    In the meantime I've copied the code to WP v2.7 and hope it works!
  • Great tip! I was looking for where this needed to be changed.

    Thanks tons!
  • I'm still playing around with this idea and was wondering if this modification to the RSS feed has any SEO implications. Anyone know?
  • Thanks for this tip! Aweber still needs to add support for full posts naively, though, because I also want to use the shorter "description" field for weekly digest emails. Right now I can't have both a newsletter that sends daily full-post emails and another newsletter that sends weekly summaries of all posts.

    Plus, now I need to remember to go back and edit this file again after every WordPress upgrade.
  • Thanks for the hack. I was trying to figure this out myself all morning. You saved my afternoon!
    Thanks again !
  • This sounds really neat. I will definitely give this a try since I use wordpress. Thanks for the great information.
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