RSS Discussion

This page is meant as a discussion repository between DokuWiki's users. Use it to discuss any topics about RSS.

Private sites need to disable feeds. Is there a non-hackish way to do it (like disabling them in local.php)?
hoberion: I really could use this feature also

I'd like to get your input on this. Currently the feed only exports the first 250 characters of a page and in plain text only (not raw format, but tag-stripped output). In response to Why do Wiki RSS Feeds Suck I wonder on how this could be improved. So here are my questions:

1. Should an additional mode parameter added to the RSS feed generator?
2. Which modes should be available? Possible:
   • simple - how it works now, 250 chars stripped content
   • full - full XHTML page
   • raw - full raw (unparsed) Wiki text
   • udiff - unified diff format (text - like in the admin notify mails)
   • diff - html as in the diff view in the wiki
3. Should it be configurable where the item links of the feed should point to? (This is now available via the $conf['rss_linkto'] configuration variable. Spider Joe)
   • could the page like now
   • or the old revisions page
   • or the diff page?
4. if all these options are available what should be the default, eg. linked as a button in the footer, or added in the header?

So what do you think is the best method? — Andreas Gohr 2005-04-17 19:04

In my optinion most useful mode would be an xhtml-version of all paragraphs with diffs, the diffs marked up with <ins> and <del> tags. It should be default link to the current page, optionally to the diff page. Raw and XHTML should be options for feed output. — Esther Brunner 2005-04-17 19:28

I agree with Esther. Seeing just the differences in XHTML format would be better for me, because since I keep track of regular changes throughout the sites powered by DokuWiki, it would be enough. I give an example: afetr I get an indication of RSSOwl that wiki:changes has been updated I always click to see the description, but I get the simple-mode output, which serves no purpose. Usually, people add at the end, or it's simply a typo correction. But for me to know what has changed I have to click on the link, click again on Old Revision, click once more to see the differences between current and last changes. 3 clicks that could be minimized to no clicks at all, if the difference page would be the output-mode I could pick for the RSS Feed. — straider 2005-04-18 12:54

Does anyone have a real need for RAW mode? For me, XHTML would be enough. Unified Diff or normal Diff could be options, I can see that being useful to someone. But the link should point straight to the current page, if the RSS Feed output is already the differences between revisions. That's more pratical, and I think easy to understand for new users. — straider 2005-04-18 12:54

Well it shouldn't be too hard to create a full XHTML view with highlighted changed paragraphs by extending the current diff classes, but there are some things to be thought of:

• The feed would be big, containing the content of 10 to 15 pages in one document with full markup and additional changed paragraphs.
• Creating such a feed would mean to create diffs for 10 to 15 pages and then parsing them, you couldn't use cache copies of the already parsed data – a not to underestimate processing overhead
• Last but not least the generated feed would not contain the stylesheet so it may look different in a feed viewer - BTW. how good is (X)HTML support in common feed readers anyway?

Adding some caching for the feed itself would certainly help with the second point. But because DokuWikis feed is dynamically adjustable by several parameters this would only work for the “default” feed. I'm just thinking aloud here - I haven't made my decision yet. — Andreas Gohr 2005-04-18 18:34

I see your considerations and they are worth thinking about. A clarificating: I meant only changed paragraphs with marked diffs, not full posts as default feed. To speed up, it could be useful to cache a fixed number of recently changed pages (for example $conf['recent']) geared towards diff feed output after saving. That fixed number would then be the maximum for the num parameter in the feed. Other output options as XHTML and Raw need no special caching, do they? — Esther Brunner 2005-04-18 22:17

There are two feed modes: recent-changes and namespace-list. Both should list only the pages within the scope, and have the content that sends the user to a diff view, formatted by CSS and using XHTML. I see now that sending all that through the feed is too much. But I prefer to receive the content with just one link to a diff view then the content as-is today, because it serves me no purpose. The best and valuable part of the content is the Edit Summary, when it exists. Does this make sense? — straider 2005-04-20 13:31

Hi there! I've been serving a full XHTML feed from my site for a while now without any significant issues. The tricks are:

• Caching
• Gzipping the feed
• Using the HTTP If-Modified-Since header and sending only the most recent items (this is the biggie, and it works wonders)

My site is a moderate-volume one, and the fact that I've survived this far on an ADSL link with a 256Kbps uplink (throttled to 160Kbps) attests to this approach's success.

Once you have this in place, providing digests, diffs, image-free feeds, etc. becomes relatively easy, although yes, you'll have to cache the before-last page revisions as well if you'd like to provide diffs (I don't particularly care about those, since many RSS readers now perform the difference highlighting on their own).

As an aside, I'm looking at portions of DokuWiki to see whether using If-Modified-Since and returning a 304 Not Modified reply wouldn't speed up normal wiki accesses as well (I've found no hint of this being used on the sources I've looked at so far, and believe me, if it's added, you'll experience a tremendous performance improvement) – Rui Carmo

I've to accompany so. I'd like tu run feeds in the style Rui does and would really enjoy a more sophisticated feed export. Benjamin 2005-06-20

Could you make two feeds? One feed would be to the diff pages and the other to the normal pages, both as seperate links at the bottom of the wiki. I use Firefox as my web browser and for my RSS feeds so when I get a feed it shows up as a folder full of links. I prefer to use the RSS as automatically updating bookmarks.

I would suggest a possibility to include certain page metadata into the feed. As the feed generation is now, we already get the page title and what has been written in the edit summary. But you could create a metadata that's a kind of short summary for the page. Using this you could keep the generated feed-file small and you could also use this metadata in link-captions instead of the link name (which is rarely very obvious). — Paolo Biggio 2006-04-18 01:07

Hi all.

I installed dokuwiki on my site and currently access to the wiki is granted through acl-ldap. If I want to keep noticed about the changes through rss (feed.php) I need to include user & password in the URL (in this way: feed.php?u=jorge&p=). Isn't there any more secure way to access the feeds?. I don't like my user & password cached in the browser cache…. — Jorge Ferrando 2005-05-05 13:55

Does the rss ignore the number of items? My included rss always displays all provided items. It seems to ignore the number e.g. 5 and also ignores the default of 8 if I leave out the number.
Any hint what went wrong? Philipp

I've installed dokuwiki in a couple different companies and in each location, the RSS feeds wouldn't display the diffs; they would display the most recent versions of the pages. This never made sense to me because (1) The URLs in the feed would jump to the diff page and (2) the feeds off of http://wiki.splitbrain.org/feed.php worked just fine. I finally figured it out.

The URLs were showing up like http://foo.com/doku.php?id=bar:baz&amp;amp;do=diff1151508479 instead of http://foo.com/doku.php?id=bar:baz&do=diff1151508479. Changing the definition in wl() in common.php from

function wl($id='',$more='',$abs=false,$sep='&'){

to

function wl($id='',$more='',$abs=false,$sep='&'){

did the trick.

doesn't work for me - I can subscribe to “Current Namespace” feed, and cannot subscribe to “Recent Changes” feed. It just says:

Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 90 seconds exceeded in /usr/share/dokuwiki/inc/utf8.php on line 119

Ok, fixed - just needed to download the latest utf8.php file from this site :)

What about including HTTP authentication or cookies in the RSS feed? That would be necessary in order to get information from protected feeds.

It would be nice if the RSS syndication permitted filtering based on content; that is, only display feed entries that match a keyword or a set of keywords.

How to display author name in rss near the date ? Something like: Thu, 01 Mar 2007 22:33:23 +0000 by authorname.

Not exactly the same problem but maybe related: I don't get the author name of the change in the feed while I can see it in “old revisions”. Maybe, it's related to the way we authenticate: through SSL client certificate.

Change line 166 in “feed.php” to

$item->author = $user;

Hello, I would like to know how I could have links to articles in a Feed and not to the diffs of an article?
Thank you in advance, Philippe Roth

rss_linkto — Christophe Gragnic 2007-11-28 13:36

Thank You Christophe for your answer. Maybe I did not explained my problem exactly. On my site http://www.philibert.ch, when I click on the link RSS at the bottom, I have a page with the RSS feed, but the links are the diffs of pages. I would like that the links are the pages themselves and not diffs. How do I do that? Modify the file feed.php? Which way? Many thanks in advance, Philippe Roth

Read the link provided by Christophe again - it provides the answer . — Michael Klier 2007-11-29 12:24