Turning on RSS blocks in moodle

My customer reminded me that they had an RSS block on their old server, which I migrated and updated to version 2.3 recently.  I knew this but forgot to add it, shame on me.

My first step was look in the moodle docs for reminders about settings i have to update.  There is a site wide setting that needed to be enabled.  Site Admin | Advanced Features | Enable RSS feeds.
 
Next, I browsed to the front page and turned editing on then choose the Remote RSS feeds block from the Add a Block... menu

Next I clicked the edit icon in the Remote RSS feeds block that was now visible and clicked the link in the settings that said Add/edit feeds.

Then I clicked the Add a feed button and specified the feed URL and name.

 Then I clicked the Add a new feed button to save it.

I looked at the other settings without making any other changes, scrolled to the bottom of the form and clicked the  Save changes button.

When I browsed back to the site front page I did NOT see the feed displaying any links.  My first thought was the feed URL is not valid, but, the feed validated on the old site.....hmmmmm.  I returned to the moodle docs in search of additional information, like does the cron service need to run to update the feed and display the links?  I did not find anything too clarifying, I did look at a bug report, but it did not seem to be the scenario I was experiencing, plus the bug was fixed and closed.

After a few more minutes of exploration, I found the problem.  After I had added the feed, I had not selected it to add it to the block.  After clicking the edit icon in the block header and highlighting the feed that now appeared in the settings page and then saving the changes the links in the RSS block appeared.

Moral of the story?  

Look for low hanging fruit first.  AND,

when adding a new feed to your RSS block, ensure you SELECT it to be included in the block....


I repeated the process on another moodle instance and saw the same result.