RSS Feed

New features only for 6.x

Hi,

I want to create an RSS feed messaging extension, but I dont know how I should start. I checked the existing plugins (email, privatemsg, sms) but those use a different technique. If you (or cron) empty the queue messages will sent through these mediums when it happens. But if you load an RSS feed, you get feed items at the time your browser/rss reader sent the request. Unfortunately the Messaging and Notification docs are missed since upgrading d.org to v6.
What do you suggest, how I can start this module?

Thanks,
Peter

PS.:

How I imagine this?
- I need a messaging_rss module - to enable subscription for RSS
- if somebody save a notification (eg: content type 'Page' with RSS) it's info saved into the notification tables
- if your rss reader sends a request its landed on some page collect the nodes (in this case) and generate an XML from them

But what I don't know, how I can retrieve the nodes and from where?
(say some of the nodes I subscribed were deleted (before i get those through rss) and i want to get them, so i need to use some kind of storage (messaging storage maybe?) but how?)

Sorry if I'm too noob.
Thanks,
Peter

P.s.: I have an idea! I create a table for storing items (and send in rss) and when Messaging framework's 'send' functions invoked, the RSS modul saves items to this table. So, if you want the RSS feed to display, it crawls the items from the table. So you can get the deleted nodes as well. As i see it works fine. How ugly is this way?

This sounds like an interesting feature, it will be welcomed.

Some notes if you want to implement this:
- You can define a 'pull' method, this means the messages will just sit on the messaging_store tables wating to be retrieved.
- You need also some user key so you can get an unique private url per user, like /messaging/rss/uid/[auth_token]
- Then you need to handle some timely cleanup (on cron or after retrieving the feed) so the data don't stay there forever

I made a very basic implementation of RSS messaging. So, it's working fine, but still needs some feature.
If you're interested in, I can send you the module if I finish it.

Thanks for your advice,
Peter

You can post the module here, we'll consider it for inclussion in the pack.

I've a little problem. I want to provide links in the RSS which points to the appropriate nodes on a site. To do this, I need to know at least the node's id when a node saved into the messaging_store. Unfortunately I couldn't find the way to do it. I use the MESSAGING_TYPE_PULL as you suggested. The nodes are saved correctly, but I can't do anything when a node is under saving to the storage, hence I can't save the node's id. And when the messages are retrieved from the storage, I can't generate links to node's page.
What do you suggest?

With MESSAGING_TYPE_PUSH I was able to do that, but yeah, that wasn't the nice way.

Thanks in advance

Jose,
What if Simple Messaging was exposed to Views? Then you could output RSS as well as other Views stuff. Have not thought through all the implications such as permissions but it might be a pretty powerful combo. Then again maybe it's not easily doable due to the way the messaging store works.
R,
Coby

Hi,

I ported my RSS extension to Drupal 6 but still not found any hook or possibility to store the node's nid. I made a very small change in the messaging_store_save() function (new hook) which quite enough for altering the message object (adding node's nid to the params attribute).
If you find it useful please consider to add to the code. This would be the last step to finish the RSS extension.

Thanks in advance,
Peter