Here is a quick tutorial on how to use the RSS feeds of your community (powered by Vanilla) and a dedicated slack channel.

Identifying the feeds you need in Vanilla Forums

Before you integrate the RSS feeds, you’ll need to decide which feeds you want to follow. With Vanilla, you have access to RSS feeds to public categories, profiles, and activities. To use content from any area of your Vanilla community,  add “/feed.rss” to the end of the URL. Some for example, you want the RSS feed of a category it will look like the following:

http://yourforum.vanillacommunity.com/categories/this-is-a-category/feed.rss

If you uncheck the “view” in the Guest roles & permissions, these will not have a public RSS feed and therefore will not be able to be used with this solution.

Get the RSS feed add-on from Slack…or not

Once you have the RSS feed you want you now you need to grab the RSS add-on from Slack. This will allow you to import the information from any RSS feed to any channel you think makes sense. All you need to do is click install.

The other option, is just to use the Slack command /feed subscribe and then the URL or the RSS feed you want. You can do this within any Slack channel you want or create a new one.

To create an area for comments on our blog, I created a new channel. I personally thought it was easier.

Now I need to subscribe to the RSS feed from my Vanilla community. We have all comments going to it’s own category, called “Blog Comments”. As I’ve explained earlier, I just add /feed.rss to the end of the category url, to grab a feed.

We can now enter this command into our Slack channel

SlackBot confirms it’s working and now anyone on this channel will get notified of any new comments on our blog.

Now that you know how to find your RSS feed, tell us how you are using it. Are you using it with Slack, Zapier or another solution?