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RSS Content Curator started as a personal tool. Building a WordPress plugin was something I had been thinking about for a long time. As someone who runs a PHP blog, I was spending 2-3 hours every day just discovering content ideas – visiting news sites, scrolling through RSS feeds, bookmarking articles, then coming back later to write. The research phase alone was eating most of my content creation time.
I knew PHP. I knew WordPress. I knew RSS. So I built a tool to solve my own problem – and then turned it into a plugin anyone can use.
This is the story of building RSS Content Curator, what it does, and where it’s going.
The Problem I Was Trying to Solve
Content discovery for a niche blog is genuinely time-consuming. You need to stay on top of what’s happening in your space, find angles worth writing about, and do it consistently without burning hours every day just to find one good topic.
The tools that existed were either too expensive, too complex, or built for agencies managing hundreds of sites – not a solo developer running a PHP blog. I wanted something that lived inside WordPress, pulled from sources I trusted, and gave me draft articles to work from – not auto-published garbage to stuff a blog with.
That distinction matters. RSS Content Curator is a research assistant, not a content farm tool. Everything it generates goes to drafts. You review it, add your analysis, and publish when it meets your standards. The plugin does the discovery. You do the writing.
How RSS Content Curator Works
The plugin connects to curated RSS feeds across seven categories, fetches recent articles, rewrites them for uniqueness, adds source attribution, optimizes for SEO, and saves everything as draft posts for your review. No API keys, no external accounts, no subscriptions for the free version.
The workflow in practice:
- Go to Content Curator in your WordPress admin
- Select one or more categories
- Optionally add custom keywords to target specific topics
- Choose your country preference – US, UK, or Global
- Set how many posts to generate per run
- Click Generate Draft Articles
- Find your new drafts under Posts – All Posts
- Review, add your insights, and publish
That’s it. What used to take 2-3 hours of manual research takes 5 minutes to generate and 20-30 minutes to refine into something worth publishing.
RSS Content Curator Features (Version 1.0.2)
7 News Categories With Curated Sources
Each category pulls from hand-picked RSS feeds from sources that actually matter in that space:
- Technology – TechCrunch, The Verge, Wired, Ars Technica, Engadget, CNET, PHP.net, Laravel News, SitePoint, CSS-Tricks, Dev.to, Smashing Magazine
- Business – Reuters Business, Forbes Business
- Science – Science Daily, New Scientist
- Health – Medical News Today, Harvard Health
- Sports – ESPN, Bleacher Report
- Entertainment – Variety, Deadline
- General News – BBC News, The Guardian
The Technology category has the deepest source list deliberately – for developer blogs, that’s where the most relevant content lives.
Custom Keywords via Google News
Categories give you broad topic coverage. Keywords let you get specific. Add comma-separated keywords and the plugin fetches articles targeting exactly those topics from Google News. If you write about PHP security, Laravel performance, or web scraping techniques, you get articles on those specific topics rather than general technology news.
Automatic Source Attribution
Every generated post includes a link back to the original source. This isn’t optional and it isn’t removable by accident – it’s baked into every draft the plugin creates. Attribution isn’t just ethical, it also adds credibility and external links to your posts.
Draft-Only Mode
The plugin cannot auto-publish. Every article goes to drafts. This isn’t a limitation – it’s a deliberate design decision. Auto-publishing scraped content is how blogs get penalized by Google and lose the trust of their readers. The draft queue is your editorial filter.
Content Rewriting
Raw RSS feed content gets rewritten for uniqueness before being saved. This gives you a starting point that’s different from the source article rather than a copy. You still need to add your own analysis and voice before publishing – but the rewrite means you’re not starting from scratch.
SEO Optimization
Each draft gets a generated meta description and focus keywords extracted from the content. This works alongside Rank Math and Yoast – the meta data populates the fields those plugins read, so your SEO foundation is already in place when you open the draft.
Code Detection and Auto-Skip
Articles heavy in code blocks get skipped automatically. This prevents the plugin from pulling in technical tutorials that would be awkward to rewrite and publish as your own content. News articles and opinion pieces come through. Code-heavy how-to guides don’t.
No API Keys Required
The plugin works out of the box with no external accounts, no API subscriptions, and no configuration beyond selecting your categories. Install, activate, generate. That’s the full setup.
Ethical Content Curation – What This Means in Practice
The phrase gets used a lot without much explanation. Here’s what ethical content curation actually means when using RSS Content Curator:
- You are discovering and researching topics, not copying content
- Every source is credited with a link – always
- Nothing publishes without your explicit action
- You add your analysis, perspective, and expertise before the draft becomes a post
- You are responsible for compliance with copyright law in your jurisdiction
Think of it the way a journalist works. They read dozens of sources, identify angles, synthesize information, and write something new that adds value. The plugin handles the “reading dozens of sources” part. The writing is still yours.
Installing RSS Content Curator
The plugin is available free on WordPress.org:
👉 RSS Content Curator on WordPress.org
Automatic installation:
- Go to WordPress Admin – Plugins – Add New
- Search for “RSS Content Curator”
- Click Install Now
- Click Activate
- Find Content Curator in your admin sidebar
Manual installation:
- Download the ZIP from the WordPress.org page
- Go to Plugins – Add New – Upload Plugin
- Upload the ZIP and activate
Requires WordPress 5.8 or higher and PHP 8.0 or higher.
The Development Story
I started building this in early 2026 as a personal tool. The first version was a standalone PHP script that ran via cron job and created posts directly in the database – no UI, no settings, just a hardcoded list of RSS feeds and a database connection. It worked, but it was completely unusable by anyone who wasn’t comfortable editing PHP files directly.
The next version moved into WordPress as a simple admin page – still no real settings, just a button that triggered the fetch process. That’s when I started sharing it with a few other WordPress developers and realized the core idea was genuinely useful beyond my own blog.
The hardest part of development wasn’t the RSS parsing or the WordPress integration – it was getting the content rewriting right. Early versions either changed too little (basically a copy of the source) or changed too much (garbled text that made no sense). Finding the balance where the output is unique enough to be useful but readable enough to actually edit took most of the development time.
The code detection feature came from a specific problem – the Technology category kept pulling in Stack Overflow answers and GitHub README files. Articles that were 80% code blocks looked terrible as draft posts and were impossible to rewrite meaningfully. The auto-skip logic checks the ratio of code to prose and filters those out before they hit your drafts.
Getting approved on WordPress.org was its own process. The Plugin Check tool flagged several issues around escaping, deprecated functions, and the way I was handling external service disclosures. Each round of fixes taught me something about WordPress coding standards I hadn’t thought to apply before. The plugin is better for it.
Version 1.0.0 went live on April 21, 2026. Version 1.0.2 followed four days later with improvements to content extraction and better handling of RSS feeds that only provide summaries rather than full article text.
What’s Coming Next
The free version covers content discovery well. The features on the roadmap push further into automation, customization, and intelligence:
Scheduled Auto-Generation
Set it and forget it. Instead of manually clicking Generate, configure the plugin to run automatically – daily, twice daily, or weekly – and wake up to new drafts already in your queue. Uses WordPress cron to trigger runs on your preferred schedule.
Multi-Language Support (19 Languages)
Content generation in your language. The PRO version will support 19 languages including Hindi, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Arabic, Japanese, and more. Generate drafts in your native language without manual translation.
Advanced Keyword Filtering
Exclude keywords as well as include them. If you write about PHP but not about WordPress plugins, exclude “WordPress plugin” from your Technology feed results. Negative keyword filtering keeps your draft queue focused on what actually matters for your specific blog.
Content Quality Scoring
Each generated draft will receive a quality score based on word count, readability, source credibility, and rewrite quality. High-scoring drafts surface first in your queue. Low-scoring ones get flagged for extra review. Spend your editing time where it matters most.
Custom RSS Feed Import
Add your own RSS feed URLs beyond the curated sources that ship with the plugin. Point it at industry-specific publications, competitor blogs, or any RSS feed relevant to your niche. Your sources, your content discovery.
Bulk Draft Management
Review, approve, and discard multiple drafts from a dedicated management screen without opening each post individually. Tag drafts by category, filter by quality score, and batch-process your queue in a fraction of the time.
Duplicate Detection
The plugin will check new drafts against your existing posts and previously generated drafts to flag similar content before it clutters your queue. If you already published something on a topic last month, you’ll know before adding another draft on the same angle.
Webhook and Zapier Integration
Trigger external workflows when new drafts are generated. Send a Slack notification, add a Trello card, or kick off a review workflow automatically. For teams managing content pipelines, webhook support turns the plugin from a solo tool into part of a larger editorial process.
PRO Version
A PRO version is in development for publishers and content teams who need more than the free version provides. PRO features include:
- Unlimited posts per run (free version: 3 per day)
- 19 language support for multi-language blogs
- Scheduled auto-generation with cron
- Advanced keyword filtering with exclusions
- Priority support
PRO will be available via Gumroad at $39/year or $69 as a one-time purchase. If you want to be notified when it launches, use the contact form to get on the list.
Get RSS Content Curator Free
RSS Content Curator is free, open source, and available now on WordPress.org. If content discovery is eating into your writing time, it’s worth trying.
👉 Download RSS Content Curator – Free on WordPress.org
If you use it and find it useful, leaving a review on WordPress.org helps other publishers find it. If you run into an issue or have a feature request, the WordPress.org support forum is the right place to raise it.
Building something that solves a real problem – even a small one – is what makes development worthwhile. This started as a personal tool and became something I’m genuinely proud to share. The roadmap above is where it’s going. Let’s see how far it gets.
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