Newsfeeds in Joomla

1. The Basics

1.1 The Two Building Blocks

News Feeds has only two concepts you need to learn:

A News Feed belongs to exactly one Category. This is the same nested category tree that articles use, so if you already know Joomla categories, you know most of this. There is no client, no form, and no creative material here - just "a URL we fetch and render".

1.2 The Moving Parts

It helps to see the whole chain at once:

Category ── News Feed → external URL → RSS/Atom XML → parsed items
            (the record)  (link field)    (fetched live)   (rendered list)

• The News Feed is a stored record that points at a feed URL.
• The Category is how you group feeds for list views and permissions.
• The feed itself lives on someone else's server. Joomla fetches it when the page renders.

This is the key idea to keep in mind: everything else in Joomla stores your data. News Feeds store a pointer to data you do not own.

1.3 Where to Find It

In the Joomla 6 backend you manage feeds in two places:

Components → News Feeds → Feeds        (the subscriptions)
Components → News Feeds → Categories   (grouping)

The front-end display is driven by menu items:

Menus → New → News Feeds → (Single News Feed / List in Category / List All Categories)

1.4 What a News Feed Actually Holds

A single feed record stores a small set of fields:

Display options such as "show feed image", "show item descriptions", and "character count" live in the params column as JSON.

3. Displaying News Feeds

3.1 A Feed Does Nothing Without a Menu Item

Like most Joomla content, a news feed is just a record until a menu item renders it. There are three menu item types:

Note the important difference: the List view lists the feeds themselves, not their items. Only the Single view fetches and shows actual headlines.

3.2 The Single News Feed View

This view combines the feed's display fields with the menu item options. The result looks like this:

[ feed image ]   Feed Title
                 Feed description
                 ────────────────
                 • Item headline 1   → links to source
                   item description (truncated)
                 • Item headline 2   → links to source
                 • ... up to numarticles

Each headline links out to the original article on the source site, not to a page on yours.

3.3 The Three-level Display Inheritance

Whether a field shows is resolved in a fixed order. This is the same pattern that Contacts and Banners use:

News Feed (edit screen)    Show / Hide / Use Global
   └─ Menu item options    Show / Hide / Use Global
        └─ Component Options (global default)

"Use Global" is the glue. Set a value once in Options, then override it per menu item or per feed only where you need to.

3.4 Template Overrides

Every view can be overridden per template:

components/com_newsfeeds/tmpl/newsfeed/default.php
templates/<your_template>/html/com_newsfeeds/newsfeed/default.php   ← override

This is where you turn a plain list of headlines into cards, a ticker, or a two-column layout. The data (the fetched feed) and the presentation (the layout) stay separate, so you override the view, never the parser.

3.5 The Shortcut: mod_feed

There is a second, much lighter way to put a feed on a page: the core Feed Display module.

Content → Site Modules → New → Feed Display   (mod_feed)

The two approaches solve different problems:

Both use the same FeedFactory under the hood. With mod_feed you paste the URL straight into the module and set the item count, description, and word limit. There is no category, no record, and no menu item.

Rule of thumb: one feed in a sidebar uses mod_feed. A browsable, categorised directory of feeds uses com_newsfeeds.

5. Categories and Access Control

5.1 News Feeds Use the Shared Category System

Feed categories are ordinary Joomla categories with extension = com_newsfeeds:

#__categories  WHERE extension = 'com_newsfeeds'

This means they get the same nested tree, the same Rebuild button, and the same access control machinery as article categories. If you want the deeper lft and rgt nested-set details, see my separate article Focus on Categories.

5.2 Why Categories Matter Here

• A List Categories menu item targets a category, and that becomes your feed directory.
• You can organise feeds by topic, partner, region, or language.
• Permissions inherit down the tree: Create, Edit, Edit State, and Delete.

5.3 Access and Language

• The Access level on the feed controls who can view it.
• The view double-checks both the feed's access and its category's access before rendering.
• The Language setting lets a feed appear only on its matching site language.

7. Under the Hood (Developer View)

7.1 One Table

The component is small. It uses a single dedicated table:

#__newsfeeds   the feed subscriptions + display params

Plus rows in the shared #__categories table where extension = com_newsfeeds.

7.2 Key Columns in #__newsfeeds

id, name, alias            identity + SEF slug
catid                      category id (→ #__categories)
link                       the RSS/Atom feed URL (varchar 2048)
numarticles                how many items to render
cache_time                 intended cache duration (seconds, default 3600)
rtl                        render right-to-left
description                editor-entered description of the feed
images                     JSON: image_first / image_second + alt/caption/float
params                     JSON: show_feed_image, show_item_description,
                           feed_character_count, feed_display_order, ...
metakey/metadesc/metadata  SEO + robots
published, access, language, ordering, hits, version
publish_up / publish_down  scheduling window

7.3 The MVC Layout

The code is split across the three standard Joomla application areas:

administrator/components/com_newsfeeds/   ← manage feeds + categories
   src/Model/NewsfeedModel.php, NewsfeedsModel.php
   src/Table, src/Controller, tmpl/, forms/newsfeed.xml

components/com_newsfeeds/                  ← front-end views
   src/Model/NewsfeedModel.php    (loads the feed RECORD)
   src/Model/CategoryModel.php    (list feeds in a category)
   src/Model/CategoriesModel.php  (category tree)
   src/View/Newsfeed/HtmlView.php (FETCHES + parses the live feed)
   src/Service/Router.php

api/components/com_newsfeeds/              ← REST
   src/Controller/FeedsController.php

The interesting split is the one mentioned earlier: the model loads the record, but the view does the remote fetch.

7.4 cache_time - the Vestigial Field

The cache_time field (default 3600) exists on every feed and in the form. However, the current front-end path fetches the feed with FeedFactory on every uncached render. It does not honour cache_time by itself.

The real caching lever is Joomla's view and component cache:

System → Global Configuration → System → Cache
   + com_newsfeeds DisplayController is cachable

Treat cache_time as legacy - a leftover from the old SimplePie era. To avoid a remote HTTP call on every page load, rely on Joomla's component cache.

7.5 SEF URLs and the Router

Feed URLs are built and parsed by the component's router:

components/com_newsfeeds/src/Service/Router.php

index.php?option=com_newsfeeds&view=newsfeed&id=7
   ↔   /news-feeds/world/bbc-world

The router builds SEF links, parses incoming paths back to a view and id, and prefers an existing menu item's segment. This means feed links survive category moves.

7.6 Programmatic Access

The same nested-set Categories API applies to feeds:

use Joomla\CMS\Categories\Categories;

$categories = Categories::getInstance('Newsfeeds');
$node       = $categories->get('world');   // by alias or id
$children   = $node->getChildren();

And you can fetch and parse any feed yourself, anywhere in Joomla:

use Joomla\CMS\Feed\FeedFactory;

$feed = (new FeedFactory())->getFeed('https://example.com/feed');
foreach ($feed as $entry) {
    echo $entry->title, ' - ', $entry->uri;   // FeedEntry objects
}

7.7 Security - Fetching the Outside World

A feed reader is a server-side HTTP client. That carries risks most components do not have:

The data is untrusted by definition - it is literally another server's output. Gate who can add feeds, and never trust feed content in your custom overrides.

7.8 At Scale

The model is simple, but consuming external feeds behaves differently from serving your own data:

The lesson: News Feeds are network-bound, not query-bound. The bottleneck is the remote server, so caching matters far more here than SQL tuning.

9. Best Practices

If you only remember a few things from this article, remember these:

• Create a category before you add a feed - every feed must live in one.
• Use the Single view to show headlines, and the List view to show a directory of feeds.
• For a single sidebar feed, reach for mod_feed instead of the full component.
• Enable Joomla's component cache - it is the real freshness and performance lever, not cache_time.
• Only let trusted user groups add or edit feeds, because the server fetches whatever URL they enter.
• Never trust feed content in custom template overrides - keep output escaped.

11. Summary

Joomla News Feeds is the one core component that pulls the outside world in. It is a server-side RSS and Atom reader, wired into the shared category tree.

It gives you:

• Aggregation: display any external RSS or Atom feed, with no copy-paste.
• Structure: the same categories tree, access control, menus, and SEF routing as the rest of Joomla.
• Parsing: Joomla's own FeedFactory and RSS/Atom parsers, with an HTTP fallback for stubborn servers.
• Display control: item count, descriptions, truncation, order, and framing images.
• Integration: Smart Search indexing and a REST API.
• A different shape: network-bound, untrusted content, where caching matters more than SQL tuning.

Once you understand that News Feeds store a pointer to someone else's data, every quirk - the render-time fetch, the vestigial cache_time, the security concerns - falls into place. Use it to curate and surface external content, lean on the component cache, and keep a tight grip on who can add feeds.

If you are building a Joomla site that aggregates partner news, or you are troubleshooting feeds that will not load, these are exactly the details that make the difference between a page that quietly works and one that quietly fails.