<h3>Title of Your RSS Feed</h3>
<?php
// assign the feed to a variable named 'feed'
$feed = 'http://url-of-your-rss-feed.com/feed/';
	if ($feed) {
		include_once(ABSPATH . WPINC . '/rss.php');
// define that 'feed' is also your url
$url = $feed;
$rss = fetch_rss($feed);
// string to return if feed fails
 	if ($rss == false){
$string .= "[No Feed To Retrieve]";
	return $string;
}
$maxitems = 10;
$items = array_slice($rss->items, 0, $maxitems);
	foreach ( $items as $item ) :
// define the string which is '$title'
// define the action 'substr' means sub-string or 'part of a string'
// define where the feed string starts - first letter is '0'
// define the length of the feed string - 55 characters
// define the trailing characters - "..."
$title = substr($item['title'],0,55)." ... ";
?>
<ul>
<li>
// link to the rss item origin with the description as the title
<a href='<?php echo $item['link']; ?>' title='<?php echo $item['description']; ?>'>
// print the truncated RSS title
<?php print $title; ?>
</a></li>
</ul>
<?php endforeach;
}
?>
<br /><br />

This code will allow you to truncate and print the titles of an rss feed. No more worries about whether or not that aggregated feed from Twitter or another blog will break your design.

For the sake of others out there who might run into the same problem, here’s how I did it. It’s pretty simple but no one has published anything as straight forward as this, yet (or at least I didn’t find one in my Google searches).

1. Log into your MySQL database via PHP Admin
2. Find the ‘xx_usermeta’ area.
3. Find the username of the account you want want to make the ‘keymaster’.
4. Look for the area that looks like this a:1:{s:13:"administrator";b:1;} and replace it with a:1:{s:9:"keymaster";b:1;}.
5. Log-In to the account to make sure everything worked.
6. Pat yourself on the back buckaroo, you’re done!

If you know hacking, you know that having an account with the username ‘Admin’ can be a security risk. I got locked out of my account after changing my name from ‘Admin’ to something else to make it harder for potential hackers to get into my forums. Then I deleted the account called ‘Admin’ because I thought it was enough that I promoted my new username to administration status. The BBPress manual doesn’t mention the fact if you delete the Admin account, you’re deleting the sole keymaster effectively locking you out of the real administration of the back end of your site!

This technique should fix everything…at least for BBPress 0.9.0.2, the version that I used this on.