Extension:RSS

shortcut: RSS

MediaWiki extensions manual

Extension:RSS Release status: stable
Implementation	Tag
Description	Display RSS feeds on a wiki page
Author(s)	K. Elliott-McCrea, mutante, D. Kinzler, Rdb, Mafs, Alxndr, T. Gries, C. Reigrut, K001, J. De Dauw, J. Phoenix, M.A. Hershberger
Latest version	2.25.1 (2017-04-21)
MediaWiki	1.23+
PHP	5.4+
License	GNU General Public License 2.0 or later
Download	Download extension Git [?]: Download Git master browse repository (GitHub) commit history code review README RELEASE-NOTES
Parameters $wgRSSCacheAge $wgRSSCacheFreshOnly $wgRSSCacheCompare $wgRSSOutputEncoding $wgRSSInputEncoding $wgRSSDetectEncoding $wgRSSFetchTimeout $wgRSSUserAgent
Hooks used ParserFirstCallInit
Translate the RSS extension if it is available at translatewiki.net
Check usage and version matrix.
Issues	Open tasks · Report a bug

The RSS extension renders ("displays") one or more RSS feeds on a wiki page in a standard or user-definable format. Since version 2.00, the extension is compatible with Extension:WikiArticleFeeds which generates RSS or ATOM feeds from MediaWiki pages (authoring tool).

Download

The extension can be retrieved directly from Git ^[?]:

• Browse code
• Some extensions have tags for stable releases.
  • Browse tags
  • Select the tag
  • Click "snapshot"
• Each branch is associated with a past MediaWiki release. There is also a "master" branch containing the latest alpha version (might require an alpha version of MediaWiki).
  • Browse branches
  • Select a branch name
  • Click "Continue"

Extract the snapshot and place it in the extensions/RSS/ directory of your MediaWiki installation.

If you are familiar with git and have shell access to your server, you can also obtain the extension as follows:

cd extensions/
git clone https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/mediawiki/extensions/RSS.git

Installation

• Download and place the file(s) in a directory called RSS in your extensions/ folder.

• Add the following code at the bottom of your LocalSettings.php:

  wfLoadExtension( 'RSS' );
  

•  Done – Navigate to Special:Version on your wiki to verify that the extension is successfully installed.

To users running MediaWiki 1.27 or earlier:

The instructions above describe the new way of installing this extension using wfLoadExtension() If you need to install this extension on these earlier versions (MediaWiki 1.27 and earlier), instead of wfLoadExtension( 'RSS' );, you need to use:

require_once "$IP/extensions/RSS/RSS.php";

Usage

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

Parameters in the RSS tag

optional tag attributes	comment
template="name"	'name' (default: rss-item) is the name of a page in the MediaWiki template namespace (default: MediaWiki:Rss-item), which comprises the name of another template (default: MediaWiki:Rss-feed since version 1.90; Template:RSSPost before version 1.90) and a list of named variables of RSS Feed channel subelements (item), these values then being passed to this other template to finally format the RSS items. Note that when a template is specified here, the extension doesn't pass to it the name of a - default - formatting template. The template specified here needs to take care of that by hard-coding the name of the other template. I.e the default template process is completely aborted.
templatename="Pagename" or templatename="Namespace:Pagename"	'Pagename' is the name of a template page which is used in the default template MediaWiki:Rss-item (defining the channel subelements) to finally format the RSS items; the template can be in the template namespace (first example denotes a page Template:Pagename) or any other namespace (second example uses the full specified form Namespace:Pagename)
max="n"	show at most n channel subelements (items)
highlight="term1 term2 ..."	highlight terms in different colours
filter="term1 term2 ..."	show only RSS items with at least one of the terms
filterout="term1 term2 ..."	do not show any RSS item containing any of these terms
reverse	display the RSS items in reverse order
date="(Y-m-d H:i:s)"	date format string (since r111347)
item-max-length="1000"	limits the number of character in item descriptions (since r111350) This is not correctly working in v2.18 see task T32377.

Tracking category

All pages in a wiki which use the RSS extension are automatically added to the RSS tracking Category:Pages_with_RSS_feeds.

Templates for channel subelements and styling the RSS Feed

A manual setup is not necessarily required. You can skip this complicated documentation section.

One template name has been changed: MediaWiki:Rss-feed since version 1.90; Template:RSSPost before version 1.90.

The RSS extension renders feeds on wiki page by using two templates in the MediaWiki system namespace, which can be changed, or which wiki admins can redirected to user-editable namespaces. The mechanism is perhaps not easy to understand, but after its installation, the extension starts with a useful set of templates; a manual set-up is not required.

If a template is not specified, then the one in MediaWiki:Rss-item is used and determines only which RSS feed channel subelements (items) are used. The other template MediaWiki:Rss-feed determines how the complete feed is shown on wiki pages i.e. how and which channel items are shown are listed.

This is the template MediaWiki:Rss-item (since version 1.90) which determines which item elements are used

{{ MediaWiki:Rss-feed \
| title = {{{title}}} \
| link = {{{link}}} \
| date = {{{date}}} \
| author = {{{author}}} \
| description = {{{description}}} }}

The selected items are passed to the other template MediaWiki:Rss-feed (since version 1.90) which determines how the RSS Feed is rendered on the wiki pages. It iterates over each <item> of the RSS feed and substitutes the value of each element found there, e.g. <title>, <link>, <date>, <author>, etc.

Basic MediaWiki:Rss-feed template:

; '''<span class='plainlinks'>[{{{link}}} {{{title}}}]</span>'''
: {{{description}}}
: {{{author}}} {{{date}}}<!-- don't use newline here -->

An alternative improved MediaWiki:Rss-feed template requires the Extension:ParserFunctions:

<!-- The second is an improved version which requires Extension:ParserFunctions --> \
; '''<span class='plainlinks'>[{{{link}}} {{{title}}}]</span>''' \
{{#if: {{{description|}}} \
|: {{{description}}}}}{{#if: {{{author|}}} \
| {{#if: {{{date|}}} |: — {{{author}}} {{{date}}}}} \
| {{#if: {{{author|}}}|: — {{{author}}}}} {{#if: {{{date|}}}|:{{{date}}}}}|}}<!-- don't use newline here -->

Example

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

<rss max=4 highlight="community wiki foundation">https://blog.wikimedia.org/feed/</rss>

Configuration settings

Add any one of the following settings you want to customize to your LocalSettings.php.

Configuration settings in RSS.php

parameter	default	comment
$wgRSSCacheAge	3600 (one hour)	Store entries in memcached for this many seconds
$wgRSSCacheCompare	false	Check cached content, if available, against remote. $wgRSSCacheCompare should be set to false or a timeout in seconds which is less than $wgRSSCacheAge after which a comparison will be made.
$wgRSSFetchTimeout	15 (since version 1.94) 5 (until version 1.93)	read timeout in seconds
$wgRSSUserAgent	'MediaWikiRSS/<Version> (+http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:RSS) / MediaWiki RSS extension'	User-Agent to use for fetching feeds
$wgRSSNamespaces	null	Ignore the RSS tag in all but the namespaces listed here null means the <rss> tag can be used anywhere
$wgRSSUrlWhitelist (since version 1.94)	array() (deny any URL = no whitelisted URLs)	URL whitelist of RSS Feeds, the whitelist is empty by default and no URLs are allowed. If there are items in the array, and the used feed URL isn't in the array, it will not be allowed. Use array( "*" ) if you as admin want to allow anyone to use any feed Url.
$wgRSSAllowedFeeds (until version 1.93)	array() (allow any URL )	DEPRECATED: URL whitelist of RSS Feeds: if there are items in the array, and the used URL isn't in the array, it will not be allowed (originally proposed in bug 27768)
$wgRSSUrlNumberOfAllowedRedirects (since version 2.10)	0 (no redirects are allowed)	Maximum number of redirects to follow (defaults to 0). This should only be used when the target URLs are trusted to avoid attacks on intranet services accessible by HTTP.
$wgRSSProxy	false	Optional proxy server url and port number to be used for fetching feeds. false: no proxy used If you need a proxy for certain urls and not for others: Example for disabling proxy use for certain urls in RSSParser::fetchRemote how to use a regular expression for a conditional proxy switching.
$wgRSSDateDefaultFormat	"Y-m-d H:i:s"	default date format for RSS publication dates (since r111347)
$wgRSSItemMaxLength (deactivated in version 2.12 r113297; will be activated later.)	200	default maximum length of item descriptions (since r111350)
$wgRSSAllowLinkTag	false	to allow active links in feed items
$wgRSSAllowImageTag	false	If you allow to see images in feed items. Do not confuse this parameter with $wgAllowImageTag of MediaWiki core, Display of images causes privacy problems, because the image is fetched in the browser context, so the (image-) server log will contain data of the requesting browser, see the discussion here. Note that since 2013 due to the Mediawiki sanitizer, image tags which have the form <img> src="blah"/> are not parsed correctly by the Mediawiki core sanitizer and are not displayed irrespective of this setting (see task T48443).

Technical history and attributions

RSS extension is a heavily modified version of the engines RSS by Mafs, RSS by Rdb78, RSS by Duesentrieb, and RSSFeed by Mutante.

See also

• Alternate extensions:
  • Extension:RSS Reader
  • More: Category:RSS extensions
• A tool to generate RSS feeds for pages in MediaWiki categories: toollabs:mediawiki-feeds