Thread

Honestly, I read a number of posts on this forum regarding RSS, and I still haven’t found the most basic of all RSS questions:

What is my actual ExpressionEngine RSS feed?

Sorry for the basic nature of this, but RSS on EE is not as intuitive as Wordpress.

I see my rss_2.0 template, but how does this factor into the actual RSS feed? I changed the parameter at the top of the rss_2.0 template to this:

{assign_variable:master_weblog_name="blog"}
{exp:rss:feed weblog="{master_weblog_name}”}

My site is in a protected area right now, so I can’t offer the actual URL. But suppose my blog was here:

http://www.mysite.com/members/index.php/blog

What is the RSS for that blog?

Am I missing something here?

Thanks for your help.

[Mod Edit: Moved to the Technical Support forum]

The address to your feed would be: domain.com/[template group]/[name of rss template]

It’s been awhile since I set mine up, but I believe you also need to modify some items down in the template as well as the header, as you’ve done.

Thank you very much for your quick reply, especially on a Saturday. 😊

I tried that URL with my site, in both Firefox and Safari on a Mac.

In Safari, I get this error message:

Safari can’t open the page.
Safari can’t open the page “feed://**protected site ***/members/index.php/site/rss_2.0”. The error is: “The feed could not be loaded because the content is not in a known feed format.” (PubSub:2) Please choose Safari > Report Bugs to Apple, note the error number, and describe what you did before you saw this message.

In Firefox, I get a blank RSS page, even though there are a number of blog posts in the blog.

There’s a lot to like in EE over Wordpress, but WP has EE beat in RSS.

Hi temada,

There is no set URL for your feeds, you can create one at any URL depending upon your site template groups and templates. If you still have the default site template group and templates and you have the original RSS template you can copy that to any other template and have RSS generated at that URL (please review the documentation on URLs).

For the specific error you mention, how are you protecting the templates at the moment? Also, the URL you have given (/members/index.php/site/rss_2.0) seems a little odd. This indicates that you have EE installed in a folder called members at the root of your domain. Is that correct?

Cheers

Greg

@carvingCode, thanks for helping out.

Hi Greg,

Thanks for your reply.

Yes, I do have my install in a folder called members. The original plan was to have a member site, and everything was developed in that folder. I have since decided to open the site to the public (a niche site), but it’s still protected by aMember until development is finished, which will be soon.

At the risk of sounding dense, I’d be lying if I said I completely understood your reply. For clarification, I’ll give you an example URL for the blog area.

http://www.mysite.com/members/index.php/blog

How do I generate an RSS feed for that URL?

Currently, my RSS template is at:

http://www.mysite.com/members/index.php/rss_2.0

How does that work in conjunction with the blog URL to produce a RSS feed. That’s where I find EE confusing. Don’t get wrong, I’m a big fan of EE and prefer it over WP. Just trying to get my head around the RSS system.

Thanks.

Hello Temada,

did you build your RSS page from scratch? I got the same error messages form Safari a while ago and it was because I just copied the RSS code from the EE site into a new and empty template. Then I forgot to change the type of the template from “Web Page” to “RSS Page” (look under “Preferences” in the template group of your RSS page.

Also make sure further down in the RSS template, you are using the right field names of the custom fields in your blog/section rather than the default “summary” and “body” (except if these are your actual field names of course.)

Hope this helps!

Wolfram

temada,

Does Wolfram help some more

How does that work in conjunction with the blog URL to produce a RSS feed. That’s where I find EE confusing.

The 2 URLs do not have to be related and the template names could in fact be called almost anything. What counts are the tags within the templates. SO in your RSS template you are telling your weblog entries tag to specifically use a certain weblog. Likewise in your blog template you are telling it to display entries using the weblog= parameter

Does that help?

Many thanks to each of you who took the time to reply to this post.

I now have my head around how this works, and as is typical for EE, it does offer more flexibility.

A few key points for me that may help others when they encounter this issue:

1) The RSS template can be named anything.

2) Remember to make sure that your custom field names (if you have them for the weblog you’re doing RSS for) are named the same in the RSS template you’re using.

3) If you have multiple weblogs, you can have multiple RSS templates.

4) Your RSS feed will be something like this: http://www.yoursite.com/index.php/rss.20 (or whatever you name your rss template)

5) For Mac Safari users, if you run into an error page that says the feed cannot be displayed, try emptying your cache, or try viewing the rss template on another Mac. I did that, and the RSS feed showed up fine on Safari on my wife’s Mac.

Thanks again to the EE community for your great support.

Glad you were able to figure out what the problem was. Don’t hesitate to post again as needed.