Following on from this thread I thought I’d open up a feature request regarding the current behaviour of the {exp:rss:feed} tag when no entries are present. Currently if no entries are present for the criteria specified then the feed is not generated at all, with EE throwing up an inaccurate ‘The section specified in your RSS feed does not exist.’ error.

As that error is wrapped in the standard EE message HTML any feed reader will report that the feed is broken whenever it is empty, which is likely to lead to users unsubscribing as they will assume the feed is useless. In my opinion the RSS feed should be generated as normal, despite containing no entries. Feed readers will then be able to provide a ‘no items’ warning which, within the context of an ‘upcoming events’ feed, for instance, is by far the more desirable behaviour.

I can’t really think of a time when the existing behaviour would be helpful. It displays a message that is inaccurate and that the user has no need to see. From a debugging perspective it’s pretty confusing.

Thoughts?

I’m not saying that this FR is without merit, but I have a hard time thinking of a scenario where your feed would be empty.

I have a site with an Upcoming Events feed. As the client in question has a variety of revenue streams events are not always going to be forthcoming. Because of that it is especially valuable to be able to provide an RSS feed, so this is an issue that I have to work around currently.