If you've ever looked at the source of my RSS feed you'll have noticed that it differs from the default feed provided by Movable Type. This is because I have spent some time - perhaps too much time - customising it. And now I'm releasing it to anyone who would like to use it in their MT installs.
Here's the file you need to use. In MT, just overwrite the default RSS 2.0 template with that one and you're away, it shouldn't require much customisation.
Here's a list of features that this feed offers over the default one:
- Inclusion of Creative Commons metadata
The feed will contain a link to the Creative Commons license that you have used (if you have one). This should avoid problems like this. - Comments link and count
The feed adds a link to the comments area of your site, which is understood by Bloglines as well as several aggregators, SharpReader and FeedDemon included. Furthermore, in SharpReader the number of comments received so far will also be shown. - Both summaries and full content included
Users of more advanced aggregators will be able to choose between full content and a brief summary (either the first 20 characters of the post or whatever is in the Excerpt field). It won't, however, include the contents of the Extended Entry field but it will add a 'Continue reading' link at the end of the post. - Includes trackback metadata
The feed will include the ping URL for your entries, as well as the ping URLs of other entries that you have pinged in an entry (if that makes sense).
The feed does not require any special plugins but is best used on Movable Type 3.0D or higher. It should also validate, too.
That reminds me, on your category rss, the homepage link points back to your category rss rather than your homepage or category page (does that even make sense?)
Thanks, I’ve fixed it.
Ah, thank you. I’ve long since wanted to work on my feed template, but never got around to it. :-) A few things…
1) Is there a reason you force UTF-8? I note that the original template chooses the encoding from the settings in MT ().
2) Any idea why clicking on the link for any of your feeds always saves the XML file to disk instead of opening in my browser? Yours is the only one I know of that does this… every other link feed displays just fine (even mine, using your new template!).
3) Plan on tackling Atom next? :-)
1) UTF-8 is what I use here. Really I should have used <$MTPublishCharset$> like the official one does. I’d probablt call that a bug, actually…
2) That’s because I send the RSS feed with the correct MIME type - application/rss+xml instead of plain application/xml . That’s just me being pedantic though.
3) Maybe :) .
Very strange, but until I clicked to comment it appeared that I was reading “ATOM” type feed, rather than the nice blog. All the formatting and appearance of the blog wasn’t in place. Posts followed each other, then the little side bar, then the sideblog BELOW all that.
Odd.
No idea what is going on, but Tesco has let me back again.
There’s something to be said for using the ‘wrong’ content-type of text/xml, however, as it lets you do fun stuff like this :)
(idea shamelessly borrowed from Google Blog’s atom feed)
Thanks Neil, I have been trying to get some of these features working, but never could.
Hi Neil, I was hoping you could help me get my client’s RSS template working. The key difference is that we need it to be UTF-8 encoding (just like yours) rather than the MT default iso-8859-1 encoding. I tried switching out MT’s default RSS template with your RSS template under the link “Here’s the file you need” (http://www.neilturner.me.uk/resources/rss20.tmpl), but no luck. It keeps returning error.
Do I actually need also do a full UTF-8 encoding for the other MT templates as well? It seems to keep breaking when it tries to encode the . I am assuming that the description text must have ASCII encoding that the UTF-8 encoding doesn’t like. I’ve been searching for the past two hours and every sample that I’ve tried isn’t working. So I’m beginning to think that it isn’t as simple as just changing the RSS template for MT. That I need to actually do a full UTF-8 conversion of the MT blog. Is this correct? Hope you can offer some advice to a blog-newbie. Thanks Tuvinh