Displays the contents of an RSS feed.

The RSS Feed macro embeds an RSS feed on a page. It can display the contents of external feeds, or of internal feeds generated by Confluence. To display blog posts or to list recently updated pages in a space, use the Feed Builder to create an internal feed, then render it using this macro.

HTML inside an RSS feed can contain active scripting components. This means that it would be possible for a malicious attacker to present a user of your site with script that their web browser would believe came from you. Such code could be used, for example, to steal a user's authentication cookie and give the attacker their Confluence login password.

The RSS Feed macro will only be available if it has been enabled by your Confluence administrator. Also, your Confluence administrator can define a whitelist of trusted URLs. You will see an error message on the Confluence page, if the included URL is not in the whitelist.

Using the RSS Feed macro

To add the RSS Feed macro to a page:

On this page:

Related pages:

Parameters

Parameter

Default

Description

RSS Feed URL

none

The URL of the RSS feed link you want to show.

Maximum Number of Entries

15

Limit the number of entries displayed.

Show Item Titles Only

false

Show only the titles of the news items, not the content.

Show Name/Title of RSS Feed

true

Hide the feeds title bar.

How up to date is the feed?

By default, the RSS Feed macro caches the feed results for 60 minutes before fetching the data again.

If you wish to change the default caching, use the Cache macro to define how often the RSS Feed macro fetches the feed updates. You will need to install the Cache plugin onto your Confluence site.

What happens to a page containing a disallowed URL?

Your Confluence Administrator can set up a whitelist of allowed URLs. If this is the case, you may see an error on the pages which contain the RSS Feed macro.

Authentication

Privatefeeds from external sites

RSS feeds which require authentication cannot be accessed using the RSS Feed macro.

Accessing internal HTTPS feeds

This applies only to Confluence instances which have enabled HTTPS for all content. If your site is fully HTTPS, the RSS Feed macro cannot access internal feeds. To enable the RSS Feed macro to access internal feeds without affecting your HTTPS setup, enable local-only HTTP access:

  1. Shut down Confluence.
  2. Consult the SSL guide to enable HTTP access to Confluence. You'll want to ensure that you have an HTTP connector and an SSL connector, both commented in. This means that Confluence will be accessible via both HTTP and HTTPS. However, you should not have a redirect port, nor rules in web.xml to redirect all traffic.
  3. Instead of using web.xml to redirect traffic, insert a firewall rule to redirect all HTTP requests not from the Confluence server to the equivalent HTTPS URL. This ensures that users will only be able to access Confluence via HTTPS, as intended. If you have still left HTTP access for attachments enabled (to avoid the IE download bug) you must selectively enable those URLS as well.
  4. Modify your Confluence RSS Feed macro feed link to use the HTTP URL, and restart Confluence.

Enabling and disabling the RSS Feed macro

The RSS Feed macro is a module of the Confluence HTML Macros plugin.

To enable or disable the RSS Feed macro:

  1. Enable the Confluence HTML Macros plugin by following the instructions in Enabling HTML macros. 
  2. In the plugin module list of the HTML macros, find the RSS (rss-xhtml) module and hover your cursor over it to enable or disable it.