RSS feeds and wordpress?

Question

I'm working on my first wordpresss website and I've really never worked with RSS feeds. However my friend that I'm doing a website for wants it in there. so I guess I'm in a crash course learning session with google to learn all I can about RSS feeds.

I was hoping to find a plugin that just allowed the visitor to subscribe to the websites blog but they are all pretty ugly, or not what I want.

I'm hoping to have an email field that I can style like the way I have designed it here.

Or even something like the way this website has it done

Are there any good plugins and articles to read up for a beginner wordpress theme developer to learn this RSS feed information?

Answer 1

As you develop WP theme, I would mention that you need to enable automatic-feed-links by adding following function call to your functions.php file:

add_theme_support( 'automatic-feed-links' );

After it RSS links fill be added automatically to head of your site. The best practice is to add this call in function for after_setup_theme hook handling:

function my_theme_setup() {
    add_theme_support( 'automatic-feed-links' );
}
add_action( 'after_setup_theme', 'my_theme_setup' );

Answer 2

RSS feeds are built into Wordpress: http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Feeds

The site you referenced uses Feedburner for feeds being read with a feed reader. For that, use any one of a number of plugins: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/search.php?q=feedburner

That site also allows people to get a feed via email, which is an email with a list of links in it. See http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/search.php?q=subscribe+feed&sort=