Hi All,

Like many others on the forum I have had problems with my site displaying RSS feeds properly from the home page - note I'm using Joomla 1.522 (stable) - and have literally spent hours if not days trying to resolve the issue on my new site (still in beta) www.crowdedbrain.co.uk/newsite.

However I think I have a solution which may help others with a similar problem with the RSS feeds, either "A" not re-directing properly or "B" showing up blank.

Note: Makes sure you backup your site before attempting any fixes.

Background: My RSS feeds where not displaying, but instead the link was simply taking me back to the frontpage content items, as maybe a lot of other users sites were, but to resolve this you need to head into Artio Jomsef configuration setting, then go to the Advanced tab. Next look for "Fix document format" option at the bottom of the page (as suggested by Artio in several forum posts) and set this to "Yes" and choose save.

Now purge your SEF cache and SEF URLS via your Artio Jomsef control panel.

If you then click on the RSS feed link in Firefox it should display the feeds properly, but if it is blank the trick next is to launch your site in IE (I was using 8) and click on the URL feed here.

This should hopefully display an error, which you can read (I think) by clicking on the more information link or details link.

Mine was displaying this error....

Whitespace is not allowed at this location.
Line: 5 Character: 41

<title>Home - Crowdedbrain - Reviews & Tech News</title>

The & was the problem here, so I next went to my Joomla sites Global configuration setting option and changed the name from & to "and" (without the quotes of course) so it read Home - Crowdedbrain - Reviews and Tech News.

Then I clicked on save and went back to the Artio Jomsef control panel and cleared out the cache and purged the SEF urls. After this I re-launched Firefox, clicked on the RSS link and hey presto it is now displaying the RSS feeds properly via the homepage link (though I still need to make site specific adjustments to the images from appearing large and fix the rss feeds for some other components, but its still a great leap forward).

Conclusion

The problem it seems is that the SEF does not like special characters being used in the name you give your site in the Global configuration setting. So if your site has weird characters in the name, try playing about with the title and remove any characters like & and see if it works.