WordPress Quickie: Remove Feed Links

Photo by Stephen Burch - http://www.flickr.com/photos/stephenburch/3334570347/

Sometimes you just want to use WordPress as a simple content management system, and the site owners don’t plan to blog or have any content for which feeds really make sense. Its easy to not add subscription options to sidebars or footers, but don’t forget the autodiscovery links in the header, which look like this:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Open Parenthesis RSS Feed" href="http://www.openparenthesis.org/feed" />

These links are what browsers like Firefox use to “autodiscover” the feeds and add the feed icon to the address bar. But what if you don’t want any feeds? Just add this line to your theme’s functions.php:

remove_theme_support('automatic-feed-links');

And voila, no more autodiscovery feed links.

There’s no codex page for remove_them_support(); but my guess is this requires WordPress 3.0 or later as that’s when 'menus', 'automatic-feed-links', 'custom-header', 'custom-background' and 'editor-style' were added to add_theme_support();.

3 Comments

  1. This is exactly what I was looking for. When I came across automatic-feed-links I figured there must be a way to remove them in a similar fashion. Unfortunately, remove-theme-support doesn’t seem to be working with the theme I am developing and wordpress 3.0.1. I working locally so I can’t offer you a link at the moment. Any ideas?

  2. Burke – are you basing your theme on some other existing theme? Sometimes the links get re-added later in the process by another call in the theme’s functions.php file

  3. Thanks for the response but this I’m developing this theme from scratch. I don’t have any plugins installed either so I can’t see why this isn’t working. Would it have anything to do with me working off line on a local server (xampp)? I can’t see that causing any problems.

Comments are closed.