This was originally written in March 2003. I have edited and added to it now in February 2004.
Our users wanted it. So I had a challenge in head of me. The RSS feed is complete!
Boy oh boy am I exited about this. Web Monkeys just get exited about stuff like this. I have coded 2 RSS templates for The BG News CMS with some syntax help from Eric at Digital Partners (DP).
Digital Partners home grown CMS (they call it Open Communications System or OCS these days) is written in the SMARTY php temple lanugage. SMARTY was closed, but ispi has open sourced it, so check it out if you get the chance.
I like SMARTY a lot, I wish I had more time to learn more. Since March 2003 I have worked on editing a few different templates, and am starting a new template, and in doing this I have learned a lot about SMARTY. I really like this CMS, I like the logic I am afforded the most I think. I wish I could write my own PHP backend so I could install it on my own server and use it.
I have created a RSS feed pulls the 3 most recent articles from each section. It is a 1.0 feed, I will not be hard at all to create a RSS 2.0 feed. I created the RSS 2.0 feed, and both validate, well, sort of. The RSS 1.0 feed has some white space at the beginning of the feed, and the validator does not like that. If I manually take out that white space and re-validate, it works. Eric figured out how to fix this with my RSS 2.0 feed, and since that is the one we publicize, we never went back to fix the white space problem in the RSS 1.0 feed.
What I am most proud of is the fact that every school's site in the DP network can now use the RSS feed that I created. All told from the time I started pestering Digital Partners about having an RSS feed for our site, to completing both templates, to final legalese, it was about an entire year.
Being able to contribute the RSS template to the network is really great. Its not really much, but hey, its more then nothing! I know DP was working on a syndication scheme that was home grown and not standards based, and since I was pushing RSS so much, Monte wrote a RSS Plugin, which is so great for the community. It sure is better to have a standards based syndication method.
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