RSS

Description

Programming RSS feeds on Plone sites

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 content 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 the Management Interface

• 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.

Syndication Settings

Plone <= 4.2

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

• https://github.com/plone/Products.CMFPlone/blob/4.2.x/Products/CMFPlone/SyndicationTool.py

Plone >= 4.3

In Plone 4.3, the portal_syndication utility was replaced by a browser view and registry settings.

The view may be traversed to from any context with @@syndication-util.

for example, in Plone 4.2 you check for the ability to syndicate a context like so:

<p class="discreet"
   tal:condition="context/portal_syndication/isSiteSyndicationAllowed">
    <a href=""
       class="link-feed"
       i18n:translate="title_rss_feed"
       tal:define="here_url context/@@plone_context_state/object_url"
       tal:attributes="href string:$here_url/search_rss?${request/QUERY_STRING}">
         Subscribe to an always-updated feed of these search terms</a>
</p>

In Plone 4.3, this is updated to look like this:

<p class="discreet"
   tal:condition="context/@@syndication-util/search_rss_enabled">
    <a href=""
       class="link-feed"
       i18n:translate="title_rss_feed"
       tal:define="here_url context/@@plone_context_state/object_url"
       tal:attributes="href string:$here_url/search_rss?${request/QUERY_STRING}">
         Subscribe to an always-updated feed of these search terms</a>
</p>

The syndication-util view is found in Products.CMFPlone.browser.syndication.utils

• https://github.com/plone/Products.CMFPlone/blob/master/Products/CMFPlone/browser/syndication/utils.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

In Plone 4.2 the RSS feed is stored in a skins template:

• https://github.com/plone/Products.CMFPlone/blob/4.2/Products/CMFPlone/skins/plone_templates/rss_template.pt

Since Plone 4.3 the RSS feed is a browser template, stored in:

• https://github.com/plone/Products.CMFPlone/blob/master/Products/CMFPlone/browser/syndication/templates/RSS.pt

Enabling full body text in RSS feed

See this example.

Since Plone 4.1 this was added by default in the RSS template, this can be enabled via the Render body setting in the RSS control panel in the site settings. For more info see https://5.docs.plone.org/adapt-and-extend/config/syndication.html