Add option to completely disable syndication feeds

[seanleavey]

Some site owners do not want to provide RSS/Atom/whatever feeds, for various reasons. Right now, there is no way to globally disable feeds. The current way to disable feeds involves:

• hiding feed URLs from the end user (by removing the "Meta" widget from the sidebar and removing the feed links from the header)
• filtering the functions that write the feed URLs
• disabling feed endpoints by deleting the array containing the feed types in WordPress core
• hooking in to the do_feed_x actions to redirect the user to a 404

See for example the instructions for disabling feeds one user provides ​here.

It would be nice if there was a setting in options-reading.php to disable syndication feeds altogether, which disables display and generation of the feeds across the whole site.

[jeremyfelt]

Hi @seanleavey, thanks for opening a ticket.

As discussed in #4959, this is something that can be handled with a plugin such as ​disable feeds.

[seanleavey]

Thanks for your comment. I already saw that plugin. The problem there is that it does not remove the feed URL from the "Meta" widget that is built-in to WordPress, where template overrides have no effect. Users will be confused at the presence of (broken) feed URLs. It's not currently possible to change the printing of the URLs there because in the source for the widget there is no hook to override the display of the URL (you can change the URL, but not remove the link).

If a configuration option is out of the question, then can there at least be a hook provided before ​line 59 of class-wp-widget-meta.php to allow a plugin to stop the printing of the feed URLs, therefore allowing a plugin to completely remove any trace of feeds?

I get that WordPress core should be as free of bloat as possible, but in this case it's not (yet) possible to accomplish this goal competely with a plugin.