How to control RSS Feeds?
andre_ - March 29, 2008 - 11:09
Hello
I would like to offer RSS Feeds for the visitors of my site and was searching the forum about RSS Feeds. I got the impression that in general it is hard to control RSS Feeds and it is a problem to disable them. Saying this, up to now I do even not know how to enable a feed.
I want to offer my users 1 or more feeds, each of them has a clear set of nodes to be published in the feed. For example one feed should have only nodes of one node type. Or in a feed should be only nodes with a defined taxonomy value. All other nodes should not appear in feeds. Is this possible?
I got inspired by this website http://www.elise.com/recipes/syndication.php. This site offers 5 clearly defined feeds.
Thanks for any help and hints.
andre
To enable and disable the
To enable and disable the site wide aggregator you can go to admin>>block then set syndication block to your preference.
If you would like to organize your site syndicated content drupal has modules. For more info refer the module down load page where you could find over 50 modules listed under Syndication:
http://drupal.org/project/Modules
Online Business
thanks for your feedback. I
thanks for your feedback. I was not aware of the syndication block and now I activated it. But in this feed only 1 node is listed....
Guide through the jungle of information - is there a basic overview?
I also checked out the "syndication" modules plus read ca. 40 posts I found with the search "rss feeds". There is a lot of information, but basic information for the rss feed beginner is hard to find. I simply want to offer my visitors one (or several) feeds. From reading all this information it is not clear to me what is drupal core functionality, why shows the syndication block feed only 1 node and whether I need one of the additional modules or not.
My question: Is there any introduction for beginners for the creation of RSS Feeds with drupal?
RSS Views
From reading posts I learned that with views I can also create rss feeds. This could perfectly fit my needs, because I can filter here with node types, taxonomy values etc. I did so by setting viewType="Views RSS:RSS feed". This worked only with the display of the title, all other fields (from custom nodes) did not work.
I guess this needs some study about CCK Fields and Feeds.
But what is confusing: There is viewTypes "Views RSS:RSS Feed" on one hand, on the other hand the handbook tells to use RSSFeed as argument (http://drupal.org/node/83597). What is the difference between the two variants?
regards
andre
How I created my custom feeds
In the meantime I researched about this topic and found a solution for my needs:
1. Pre-peration:
- Make sure your categories are useful, because they are included in the feed as tags
- I introduced a category "News Category" with the values "No Feed Publishing" and "Qi Gong News" (my site is about Qi Gong). With this tag I control whether a node should appear in the feed or not
2. Create custom View
• Enter Name
• Enter Description
• Check “Provide Page View”
• Enter URL
• ViewType = “Views RSS:RSS feed”
• Enter Title (=This is the title to be published)
• Check “Use Pager”
• Nodes per Page: 50
• Fields: Leave empty
• Filters: a) RSSFeed=News and b) published=yes
• Meta Tags
--> This way I can completely control which nodes are published on the feed. This way I can also publish several feeds with different nodes
3. Edit Contemplate
On my site I have several custom nodes. All of them are included in the feed. In order to define what fields of the custom nodes are shown in the feed we must edit the contemplate of each custom node:
- in administer/content management/content templates press "edit template" next to the content type
- in "RSS" section: enter fields of node which you want to have in RSS view.
For each node in RSS Section of Contemplate insert this:
<div class="field field-type-text field-field_description_school"><div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item"><?php print $node->field_description_school[0]['view'] ?></div>
</div>
</div>
"description_school" is the field name for the output and must be replaced with the corresponding field name.
4. Configure RSS Settings
a) In administer/ content management/RSS publishing.
b) To define size of trimmed information. It is defined in the same same place as for teaser: administer/content management/post settings in "Length of trimmed posts".
5. Clean Feed
In order to remove HTML tags from Feeds install the module cleanfeeds. After enabling the module go to Go to "Administer -> Site Configuration -> Cleanfeeds" and select the types of nodes you want to be cleaned in feeds.
6. Feedburner
If you want to use feedburner:
Install the module FeedBurner
Creating Feedburner Feed and Redirect:
Follow ReadMe Instructions from Feedburner Module
7. Promote Feed on your site:
I recommend to promote the own original feed and not the feedburner feed for subscribing. Otherweise users subscribe the feedburner feed. You can promote your feed in connection with feedreaders, so that the user presses on the widget of the feedreader and your url is passed.