This discussion is a subtopic that came out of the conversation about
the Atlas proposal for the new Roller front page. This will be for
talking about the problem of if/how an admin (or user?) could be allowed
to add custom feeds for use in a weblog. An example would be a custom
site-wide feed or planet group feed.
Right now we just allow for weblog feeds and they are controlled and
standardized within Roller, so anyone wanting to add new feeds has to do
it as a custom page.
Some thoughts ...
1. there is a finite and controlled set of query params that are
considered by the FlavorServlet when rendering feeds. to allow for
custom feeds means we would probably need to allow for arbitrary query
params and that makes things more complicated.
2. technically any user can add custom feeds by just adding a page
template with whatever they want (/<weblog>/page/<myfeed>). the down
side is that this is separate from the other standard feeds
(/<weblog>/feed/<flavor>), but it sounds like we are going to allow
templates access to all query params for these pages, so they should be
pretty flexible.
3. users can already override the templates used for their feeds by
defining certain templates, like _rss (i think?). this would allow
someone to redefine how their standard rss feed works, but wouldn't
allow for using additional query params.
-- Allen
