brandondawson.org Drupal Website Developer and Consultant

Globally suppress or disable “core” RSS functionality in Joomla 1.5

I've constantly had this problem, as I'll often want to replace the "Joomla default" feeds with Feedburner. I finally came across a solution on the Joomla forums that worked really well, and I wanted to share it here for posterity, as it involves simply applying an SQL query to suppress display of the feed functionality across all menu items.

Therefore, it requires no hacking of core files or adding any new modules or components. I've extended the version on the J! forums by adding instructions for doing this from the command line on a LAMP server.

How to globally suppress or disable the core RSS in Joomla 1.5

1.) Edit your template and include a link to your Feedburner or other alternative RSS feed.
From here, I'll provide two sets of instructions: One for those with phpMyAdmin, one for those with only shell access.

phpMyAdmin

2.) Open your database within the phpMyAdmin application.
3.) Export your database so that you have a backup.
4.) Click on the SQL tab, and insert the following query:
update jos_menu set params = replace(params, 'show_feed_link=1', 'show_feed_link=0')
5.) Click "Go".

CLI method

2.) Open your shell.
3.) Dump your database so you have a backup in case things go sideways.
mysqldump -u your_database_username_here -p your_database_name_here > your_database_name.sql
4.) Run this command to run the appropriate query:
mysql -u your_database_username_here -p your_database_name_here -e "update jos_menu set params = replace(params, 'show_feed_link=1', 'show_feed_link=0')"