Comments on: Weekly Web Development Round-up June 27-July 01, 2011

By: Ian McBride

Ian McBride — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 18:47:53 +0000

I’ve now made the change I described back in July live on the site so you’ll see the full markup version of the content in the Library Spotlight RSS Page and others.

By: Ian McBride

Ian McBride — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 14:52:51 +0000

Good question, Carrie. The adjustments to RSS feeds mentioned in this post are just to the feeds that Drupal *outputs*, rather than the RSS Page content type that’s part of how Drupal *consumes* RSS. In this case, you’re talking about a feed generated by WordPress that is then displayed in Drupal, rather than a feed generated by Drupal.

However, you’ve brought up an issue that we can work on resolving. The problem with the Library Spotlight RSS Page node is that the RSS Page module (which was developed by Amherst as part of Monster Menus) only displays the content of the tag in the RSS feed, which WordPress outputs as a summary of the post content with many of the HTML tags removed (it leaves image tags and links only, I believe). What we want to display is the content of the tag from the feed, which contains the full post and markup.

I have a preliminary version of this working in development, but want to develop it further to ensure that only allowed tags are allowed through (so we don’t allow arbitrary JavaScript or embedded media to be displayed via an RSS feed), that we handle media enclosures correctly, that we do it in a way that doesn’t change everyone’s RSS feeds overnight, and in a way that Amherst can turn off the feature if they (likely) decide not to use it.

Look for notes about this in one of these weekly updates as I get closer to getting this in production. Thanks for the feedback!

By: Carrie Macfarlane

Carrie Macfarlane — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 13:17:02 +0000

Hooray for adjustments to RSS feeds! Thanks! I’m glad that images now will display. Will it eventually be possible to preserve formatting, such as bullets, and links too? (I’m not sure what is meant by “This support will be expanded to other content types.”) With bullets and links, the “Library Spotlight” feed on the library home page would be more readable. See for example the post that’s there now (http://go.middlebury.edu/lib). It doesn’t make a lot of sense without the bullets and links that were in the original (http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2011/06/24/welcome-to-our-summer-students/). Thanks!