HubSpot Ideas

seancrater

Blog RSS Featured Image

Hi there,

 

I was wondering if there is a reason why the RSS feeds for blogs don't include the featured image for a post? We're using the RSS feed to generate emails using Digesto and it's become a pain point that we can't access the images that we upload for each post.

 

I'd imagine it could print out something like this, probably fairly easy to add to the feed as well because I'm guessing Hubspot has it developed in a way they can access the post data as an object.

 

<image>http://image-source-here.jpg</image>

Thanks!

Sean

HubSpot Updates
Not Currently Planned
August 14, 2020 09:27 AM

Hi @marianberry , I'm sorry this has been costly for your clients 😣

 

@Joe_list Of course you can use any element you want to in HTML -- but here we're talking about people being unable to use the email tool in HubSpot to automatically pull in their featured blog image from WordPress (or similar). It's precisely because you can use whatever HTML you want to that we can't pull in the image reliably. For the email tool to be able to do that, you can't have the featured image element named whatever you want - the tool won't know what to look for. That's why it does actually need to be part of the RSS standard in order for us to include it, because as it is (not part of the standard), there's no way to reliably pull in the featured image from blogs hosted outside of HubSpot. 

 

For anyone looking for a solution, I've heard customers have had success with this WordPress plugin. 

Not Currently Planned
April 13, 2020 10:21 AM

Hello everyone,

 

The exclusion of the featured image in the RSS feed is deliberate because the concept of a featured image isn't part of the RSS feed standard (see http://www.rssboard.org/rss-profile for documentation of the standard), so when the feed is external, there's no universal way to identify the featured image for each post in an RSS feed. There seem to be some common ways people include featured images in the content:encoded element in their Wordpress (or other CMS') blog RSS feeds, but it can vary from blog to blog. 

 

For now and the foreseeable future, we're going to stick with the RSS feed standard of not including the featured image in RSS feeds. We're always re-evaluting these types of product decisions based on the feedback we get from our customers, so if you disagree with this decision please comment here and let us know! 

 

- Snaedis 

40 Replies
mike_ropelato
Member

I'm also having this problem of an image not pulling in. It's fine on the HubSpot platform/blog where you can turn the image "on" and it shows the thumbnail on the sidebar. However, when trying to grab the rss feed and implement it onto an external website all it seems to pull in is the title/description of the post, but no image. If someone has any idea how to achieve the image with the rest of the snippet, that would be great!

MikeAcro
Participant

I'm also looking for this solution to be implemented for the same reasons as mike_ropelato above. Need the ability to show featured images outside of HubSpot.

cazwilson
Participant

I'm interested in this, as well. Other third party services allow it. Even if it means adding a function to the external blog's theme.

For example, this function added to a Wordpress theme for Mailchimp:

 

// Add feature image to RSS

function featuredtoRSS($content) {
global $post;
if ( has_post_thumbnail( $post->ID ) ){
$content = '<div>' . get_the_post_thumbnail( $post->ID, 'medium', array( 'style' => 'margin-bottom: 15px;' ) ) . '</div>' . $content;
}
return $content;
}
add_filter('the_excerpt_rss', 'featuredtoRSS');
add_filter('the_content_feed', 'featuredtoRSS');

 

Thanks.

shacharb
Participant

So officaly this is not  supported feature? 

MikeAcro
Participant

@shacharb Not as of yet, unfortunately. Hopefully, more people having this issue find this thread and comment so that it gets some traction.

seancrater
Member

@shacharb Unfortunately it's not supported quite yet but since the featured images are included in the description of the RSS feed you can technically slice it out using a functional programming language like JS or PHP if your server configuration where you are trying to use this permits it. In my use case, it'd be preferable for Hubspot to add the ability to query posts from a JSON API since the designs I'm handed frequently request the ability to show our latest blog posts on the front page of our site but I think this might count as an additional ask haha.

subin
Top Contributor | Gold Partner

@all i am also trying for getting a slution For this, i have loaded the Featured image by creating a seperate RSS feed from a WP website but its not possible to load the excertps. its not working with post. {{post.summary}} tag, my featured image is loading through this {{post.summary}} tag, 

samina
Member

Has anyone had any headway into this problem? We're having the exact same issue and we aren't sure if it's a dev error on our end or hubspot doesn't support it. 

marianberry
Contributor

@samina No, if the blog is external to HS, HS does not support pulling in a featured image.

 

@subin, you said you were successful in getting the image to pull in from Wordpress? Can you share your code here? I have been successful in pulling in short description and title, but the image is the killer. Would love to see your workaround and learn from it.

 

Just had a major client request this feature to an upvote from me on adding this as a feature request.

SofiaBjorklov
Member

I also wish it was possible to add rss featured images for rss blog feed emails we send out. Please Hubspot!

annaliseo
Participant

A few months ago, I created a workaround that was working pretty flawlessly but now the formatting is being stripped (this fixes itself on a hard refresh, but I still need to figure out what's going on). Anyone have any ideas? You'll find three huge images sitting at the bottom of the page when it's broken. Not a great look.

 

Our blog is hosted on HubSpot and the rest of our site is WordPress. We have a persistent sidebar that features the three most recent posts from a custom WordPress post type ("Our Work") so I needed to re-create this for our HubSpot blog template. You can see it here: https://blog.shawmutdelivers.com

 

I used http://rss.bloople.net to embed our WordPress RSS feed for that content type, and I was able to bring featured images through that way.

 

I created a custom HTML block within our HubSpot blog template sidebar, and gave it its own class. Then I was able to hide and position what I needed with CSS.

 

<h3>Recent Work</h3>
<script src="//rss.bloople.net/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.shawmutdelivers.com%2Ffeed%2F%3Fpost_type%3Dour_work&limit=3&showtitle=false&type=js"></script>

 

It's far from perfect, but it works until HubSpot makes this a native option.

rschmidtaim
Member

Please add my vote to the stack! I've tried  {{post.featured_image}} without luck.

MicaelaH
Participant

Automatically including the featured image for a blog really would be helpful - I'm facing a choice of manually adding blog images into every blog digest email or automating our digest emails without images - which is much less visually appealing. This seems like a pretty generic feature - anyone heard why it's not available? Or just that it isn't?

claromentis
Member

I would also like to see this feature implemented. We're trying to move all our email marketing from MailChimp to HubSpot, but without the ability to include a featured image in the HubSpot RSS emails, it doesn't look like we'll be able to.

suryast
Participant

I have recently come across this issue too. My marketing team will probably need to move away from Hubspot for EDMs without this feature available. 

jess-sd
Member

For anyone who wants to display their hubspot rss feed on WordPress, this plugin seems to do the trick:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/feedzy-rss-feeds/

suryast
Participant

If you set up your Hubspot email as 'RSS email' and include your <img> tags inside your RSS' <description> tags, you can enable pulling of images inside your emails. You might need a developer or someone with some coding experience to plan out the details though. 

mailclick
Participant | Diamond Partner

I'm wondering why Hubspot doesn't have such a basic characteristique... Things so common in all the tools and softwares I'd hope were a "must" here...

jlamb2
Contributor

echoing @suryast - I modified my RSS feed to include the featured image in the description and it works!

suryast
Participant

That's great to hear @jlamb2. Let us know if you have any screenshot you can share with us here too.