Extension:RSS

The RSS extension displays an RSS feed on a wiki page in a standard or user-definable format. It is flagged as experimental, because the current version fails to show many variants of RSS feeds, if not the majority. It is admitted, that the extension urgently needs fixes. --Wikinaut 14:33, 25 August 2011 (UTC)

Installation

 * 1) Download the files into
 * 2) Place the following text in your LocalSettings.php file: require_once("$IP/extensions/RSS/RSS.php");
 * 3) Installation can now be verified through your wiki's Special:Version

Usage
Use one section between -tags for each feed. The rss element may contain parameters if you provide them as attributes to the rss element:

This extension supports filtering-out (i.e. ) items based on title when in short list mode.

Templates for channel subelements and styling the RSS Feed
If a template is not specified, then the one in MediaWiki:Rss-item is used and determines which RSS feed channel subelements (items) are used.

This is by default (until extension version 1.8)

This is the new template, suggested and proposed for implementation in version 1.9+

The selected items are passed to another template Template:RSSPost which determines how the RSS Feed is rendered on the wiki pages. It iterates over each &lt;item&gt; of the RSS feed and substitutes the value of each element found there, e.g. &lt;title&gt;, &lt;link&gt;, &lt;date&gt;, &lt;author&gt;, etc.

Example
The following code renders the 5 recent items of the wikimedia blog feed on the present page and highlights some terms. The layout depends on the content of feed template Template:RSSPost and also of the item template MediaWiki:Rss-item as mentioned above: http://blog.wikimedia.org/feed/ http://blog.wikimedia.org/feed/

It does not work: Message "Error parsing XML for RSS" shown

 * Filed as Bug 30028 "Error parsing XML and HTML for RSS" - improve and harden Extension:RSS when parsing differently flavoured RSS feeds". If you have to make any comments, please add them to this bug.

The Extension fails to render a big group of feeds with the message "Error parsing XML for RSS". There's a known issue (bug) with the XML parsing of non-RSS feeds. I started investigations how this can finally be solved. --Wikinaut (talk) 08:36, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

Technical history
RSS extension is a modified version of
 * the RSS engine from Mafs, which is a modified version of
 * the RSS engine from Rdb78, which is a modified version of
 * the RSS engine from Duesentrieb, which is a modified version of
 * the RSS-feed extension by Mutante.

Change Log

 * original by mutante 25.03.2005
 * extended by Duesentrieb 30.04.2005
 * extended by Rdb78 07.07.2005
 * extended by Mafs 10.07.2005, 24.07.2005
 * extended by Niffler 28.02.2006
 * modified by Dzag 07.2006
 * modified by Alxndr 09.2006
 * modified by Svanslyck 02.2008, replacing all « and » with "
 * This has been updated to work better on newer (1.9) MediaWiki software, with the help of User:Duesentrieb. --CryptoQuick 14:26, 24 January 2007 (UTC)
 * This appears not to be true; I have received numerous emails about it not working with 1.9+. I would love to help debug and fix the extension, but my host has not upgraded to PHP 5 and I'm thus stuck at MediaWiki 1.6.8, so that's as far as this is guaranteed to work properly. If anyone develops a fix, please post a link to it here! &#x2014;Alxndr&#x00a0;(t) 02:02, 16 June 2007 (UTC)
 * I just found this fork that purports to have a fix for the new loss of wfStrEncode. I can't test it though so can anyone else verify that it works? &#x2014;Alxndr&#x00a0;(t) 02:18, 16 June 2007 (UTC)
 * modified by --Wikinaut 11:17, 7 May 2008 (UTC) : changed method to disable chaching; Extension is now compatible to MediaWiki 1.12
 * modified by Cmreigrut 19:05, 19 November 2008 (UTC): added date (if specified) to short output
 * modified by Peter Newman: 03:15, 7 October 2009 (UTC) Added htmlspecialchars escaping to the displayed strings
 * modified by K001 15:15, 26 January 2010 (UTC): version 1.6, added support for date formats

Version 1.7
2010-7-23


 * Cleaned up, included MagpieRSS library and put onto the WMF subversion repository by Jeroen De Dauw
 * i18n file added by TranslateWiki.net people

Version 1.8
2010-10-19


 * Removed dependencies on Snoopy in favor of MediaWiki's internal HttpRequest and removed MagpieRSS (perhaps to be replaced later with SimplePie) because of concerns about MagpieRSS's security problems and lack of maintenance.
 * Added ability to do more with the layout of RSS feeds.

Version 1.92 2012-02-13

 * added optional date format string
 * added optional item length limitation