Great rss aggregator with a few small issues

I have found feedzy easy to use to set up a snazzy blog roll showing the latest posts of my favourite bloggers in a magazine format (via custom css)

The basic functioning is straight forwards, and once you have found the feed url for the site you want to display it pulls in the data reliably. Strangely, for some feeds it can’t see the images, even though they show up in feed readers like Feedly.

The plugin’s category feature allows you to bundle a list of feeds and output them via a single Gutenberg block. Great for a “latest news” page from mixed sources.

Without adding custom css the output is acceptable, if rather bland with the thumbnail being floated left, making the text wrap around it. This is fine as long as the container is wide enough. In narrow columns it looks bad, so you will want to style it with custom css.

I like simple, functional plugins that are easy to style with custom css, transforming them into something great. Feedzy is pretty good from this perspective but it does puts a few obstacles in your way.

The feedzy items are output as an unordered list, which can be styled to look the way you want in css e.g display:grid.

Styling the output with css is relatively easy, although the meta data is outputted as a single string so you can’t reorder / separate the author from the date. Also, the date format is pulled from your global WP settings, which it would be nice to set independently. Also, each feed item carries some inline styling (why?) which forces the use of !important in css to override the settings. That said, these are small niggles considering this is a free plugin!

If you make the thumbnail larger via css the images can scale well. They only look grainy when enlarged if the image offered from the feed source is low resolution. Feeds with high-res images can be scaled up to create large featured posts. Unfortunately, in mixed source feeds some will display better than others. One downside to Feedzy images it that they are downloaded at full resolution in the browser, even though they are being displayed as a thumbnail, so they can significantly increase page size and thus increase page load times. It would be great to be able to set a max size in settings so that this could be controlled.

Support has been brilliant. When I suggested a couple of improvements they pushed them out as an update within 24 hours! (Coincidence?) When I pointed out a bug they patched it within hours.