Well folks, I gave it a good college try, but I have to say that the DualFeeds plug-in for WordPress just doesn’t work… for me anyway.
The plug-in is supposed to allow you to have dual RSS feeds – a standard WordPress “summary” feed and a “full-text feed” that contains the entire text of a post. Sadly, I’ve just never gotten to to work correctly. By default, the plug-in changes your MAIN feed to full-text and creates a new “summary” text feed; the plug-in also has a “flip feeds” option that allows you to swap this around so as not to disrupt your current RSS subscribers. This option seems to “flip itself” any time I activate or deactivate the plug-in. By this I mean that if I activate the plug-in and choose “flip feed”, it will flip it, but if I deactivate and reactivate the plug-in it will “flip it” again. It’s kind of like two light switches at opposite ends of a stairway: instead of having a fixed “on” or “off” position, they work either way. DualFeeds seems to do the same, and that’s confusing.
Also, DualFeeds has a “feature” I really don’t like: a content cutoff. Normally it searches for WordPress’ MORE tag and cuts off the “summary” RSS post there. However if it doesn’t find a MORE tag, it simply cuts off the post after a certain number of characters. By default, DualFeeds cuts off your summary feeds after 500 characters per post. I’ve tried playing around with the character limits to try and find a sweet spot, but what I’d really prefer is an option to split the summary post only if there’s a MORE tag.
In any case, I’ve disabled DualFeeds and will actually delete the plug-in files later today. I’ll also be replacing my “hacked” Meta section on the sidebar with the original one, so the full-text link will go away. The good news is that if you’re subscribed to the feed using the “full-text” link, you don’t have to do anything: apparently, DualFeeds works by adding “&dualfeed=2” to the end of the existing RSS feed address. With DualFeeds disabled, WordPress simply ignores anything posted after “feed=rss2”. So you full-text guys need not change anything.
Sorry it didn’t work out, guys.