RSS ¶

Description

Programming RSS feeds on Plone sites

local

RSS

Introduction ¶

Plone can generate RSS feeds from folderish content types (folder / collection). If you want to aggregate content from all the site to RSS feed, you first create a collection conten item and then enable RSS feed on this collection content item.

Creating a global, language neutral, Plone site content aggregator ¶

These instructions tell you how to create a RSS feed collection for your Plone site. You can choose what content types ends up to the RSS stream. Also, the aggregator is language aware so that it works correctly on multilingual sites.

Creating the collection ¶

First we create a collection which will aggregate all the site content for the RSS feed.

Go to site root
Add new collection
Title "Your site name - RSS feed"
On Category tab, set Language to neutral
On Settings tab, choose Exclude from navigation
Save
Go to site root / Contents tab
Check your RSS content collection
Choose Rename button
Change item id to site-feed

Collecting content for the RSS feed ¶

Go to your collection content item
Go to criteria tab
Set content types criteria
Set sort by publishing date, reverse
Save
Now, choose content items you want to appear in the feed and Save again

You can now preview the content of RSS feed on View tab.

Linking the RSS feed to site action links ¶

Site actions is the top right link slot on the Plone site. By default, Plone site wide RSS link will appear there if enabled.

Go to portal_actions in ZMI
Go to /portal_actions/site_actions/rss

In URL expression type:

string:${object/@@plone_portal_state/portal_url}/site-feed/RSS?set_language=${object/@@plone_portal_state/language}

This expression will

Get URL for site-feed object, using RSS template
Will explicitly set HTTP GET query parameter set_language which can be used to manually force Plone content language. We use the current language (from the user cookie) here, to make sure that the user gets RSS feed in correct language on multilingual sites.

More about expressions.

Publish and test ¶

Publish collection after the content seems to be right, using the workflow menu on the collection content item.

Test RSS feed by copy-pasting RSS URL from the site action to your RSS Reader, like Google Reader.

portal_syndication ¶

portal_syndication is a persistent utility managing RSS settings. It provides settings to for formatting RSS feeds (update frequence, number of items).

http://svn.plone.org/svn/plone/Plone/trunk/Products/CMFPlone/SyndicationTool.py

Publishing content through RSS in Plone 4 ¶

Access /content/synPropertiesForm and publish.

RSS feed content ¶

RSS feed content is the content of the folder or special stream provided by the content type.

portal_syndication uses the following logic to pull the content:

if hasattr(obj, 'synContentValues'):
    values = obj.synContentValues()
else:
    values = obj.getFolderContents()
return values

Changing RSS feed template ¶

RSS feed is stored in template CMFPlone/skins/plone_templates/rss_template.

Enabling full body text in RSS feed ¶

See this example.