Thread

I’m new to RSS and trying to figure out some things about how it works. I hope someone can give me some basic info on how EE handles RSS.

I understand that RSS is basically you saying “here, subscribe to this piece of content” which is updated when something changes, but I am sort of unclear of the basic steps of how RSS works in EE. Can someone outline a very quick “plain english” sumamary of that?

1. Do I need an RSS feed template file in every template group, or can I have just one on the main template group? This may expose my ignorance on how RSS works, and how RSS works in EE, so have mercy!

2. I noticed that if I view the source code of my pages, they have a commented block of code that seems to be related to RSS, but not sure if this is how it’s supposed to look. What causes this code to show up?

Edit: 3. How do I “enable” a weblog to “use” a particular RSS feed? I assume there is a way to do this for a whole page (all weblogs on one page), and a per-weblog:entries tag way of doing this.

All for now until I know more. Thanks!

RSS For Multiple Weblogs is a wiki entry you might find helpful.

1. No, you don’t need an RSS feed template for each template group. There is no relationship between a template group and a feed.

There is a relationship between a weblog and a feed.

2. Do you have a link to the page in question?

I’d query for RSS and read the entries in the wiki for come clarification.

Thanks Sue,

I’ll take a look. I don’t have the site on-line yet, I’m working locally. The site will launch sometime in the next two weeks. I’m hoping to add RSS before launch if I can, but it can go in after also.

Guess I have to do some reading. It’s hard to put into an accurate question, but could you explain the nuts & bolts as it were, of how RSS is handled in EE?

Joel.

The ‘logic’ of the EE end of RSS output is almost exactly like the logic of the weblog tag- you can pull in any entries from any weblogs/categories/etc.  So a feed is no more associated with a given weblog and/or template than any other page with a weblog tag on it.  Basically?  The feed can serve up whatever you specify in the tag parameters.  So you could have per weblog feeds, per category feeds, per entry comment feeds…

About the only real difference- rss has channel data and item data.  The items are just entries- that bit is served up just like any other weblog tag.  The channel data is the data for the whole feed- so it may contain info for the whole site- if you only have one feed- or info for a single weblog, OR info for a single category in a weblog….  In short- it’s very flexible.

To get a good feel- take a stock rss template and view the output in something like FF.  It’s actually pretty readable and you can get a feel for what’s going on.

That help at all?

Awesome Robin,

That’s exactly what I was looking for. It helps tremendously. Now I know where to head.

Thanks!