News RSS Mod?

[tekguru]

Guys I've bene looking at the NEWS_RSS part of IM1.41 tryign to get it to format a little better.

So far I've got the code as:

Code: Select all

<xml><rss>    <channel>       <title>{TITLE} News Snippets</title>       <link>{BOARD_URL}</link>       <de>The UK site 4 Windows Mobile Devices</de>       <pubDate>{LAST_BUILD}</pubDate>       <lastBuildDate>{LAST_BUILD}</lastBuildDate>       <docs>http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss</docs>       <generator>{PROGRAM}</generator>{LANGUAGE}       <category>{CATEGORY}</category>       <ttl>{TTL}</ttl>       <managingEditor>{BOARD_MANAGING_EDITOR}</managingEditor>       <webMaster>{WEBMASTER}</webMaster>       <image>     <url>{BOARD_URL}templates/subSilver/images/logo_phpBB_med.gif</url>     <title>{BOARD_TITLE}</title>     <link>{BOARD_URL}</link>     <width>122</width>     <height>56</height>       </image>   <BEGIN>   <item>     <title>{articles.L_TITLE}</title>     <link>{INDEX_FILE}?topic_id={articles.ID}</link>     <pubDate>{articles.RFC_POST_DATE}</pubDate>     <category>{INDEX_FILE}?cat_id={articles.CAT_ID}</category>     <de>     <CDATA>     </de>     <comments>{articles.U_COMMENTS}</comments>   </item>   <END>   </channel></rss>

The problem is I want to get the link to go straight to the topic view instead of viewing the article of the portal.

Any ideas how one achieves this?

[Teelk]

I'm going to do a little overhaul on the news system, since the RSS feed doesn't validate 100% no matter what you do. The problem is that the standards have changed since the MOD was written. Having the link go directly to the topic in question, and not displaying it on the portal is one of the goals as well. I had done it long ago on my site, before I was part of the staff here, so it's doable. It'll be available in the next version of IM, which should be relatively soon.

[tekguru]

Very good idea Teelk, I've now got to the stage where it links to the topic in question, and the option of not displaying on the portal would be cool.

Validation is inded an issue, I was thinking of using the feedcreator libraries to take a look at it myself as that is what the Smartfeed Moid uses and it works very well indeed.

Do you think itis worth me looking at that path in parallel? Bearing in minds I'm no PHP coder <img>

[Teelk]

Smartfeed seems to be the best parser around. It even, apparently, parses curly quotes which is the number one reason why most feeds won't validate. Curly quotes being used in MS Word etc., so people copy and paste from there into a post and it breaks the feed.

I'll be looking at how smartfeed works and hopefully can apply some of the ideas into the news feed.

[tekguru]

That will be superb! I looked at it all for about an hour tonight - just long enough to work out it was way about my head <img>

There are just too many codes that need to be escaped for a feed to be properly validated and unfortunately my PHP coding is just nowhere near the quality needed to even plan what changes would be needed ;(

[tekguru]

Any joy Teelk?

[Master Dwarf]

I was just looking into adding a podcast to the site. It would be easy to implement into a news category, but then I noticed the feed does not validate. I tried looking at some of the code, especially the carry over for 'category' since that's one that is not working via the produced xml doc, but have had no luck.

Just wondering if anyone else had any luck or atlernative to creating a valid rss feed using the Integramod forums.

[richiebgood]

I have a topic rss feed, not just for news but for all topics. It works pretty well.

http://www.paintballer.ie/rss.php

Also, is you look in my footer you will see links to my sitemaps.

[Master Dwarf]

I have a topic rss feed, not just for news but for all topics. It works pretty well.

http://www.paintballer.ie/rss.php

Also, is you look in my footer you will see links to my sitemaps.

Thanks, I may have to give it a go.