On 6/5/06, Allen Gilliland <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
i am on board with the idea behind #4, which is that each weblog should
have the ability to control what feeds it offers, but i don't
particularly see how the feedspec thingy is useful.
i have a couple more fundamental questions about what direction we
really want to take here, then a suggestion ...
1. Do we want to allow admins/users to have full control over what feeds
are available for a weblog? or do we want to continue our current path
where we basically handle feeds for them?
We still want to handle feeds for most users. I think that is still an
important feature. But for some weblogs (and especially the frontpage
one) we want to allow a blog owner to add new category, language
and/or planet group filtered feeds.
2. Is it important for all feeds to be under the new
<weblog>/feed/<flavor> url? or is it okay if custom feeds exist as
custom weblog pages under <weblog>/page/<myfeed>
I think each blog should have two primary feeds that exist in a
standard location: one for most recent entries and one for most
recent comments. For both feeds, individual bloggers should be
able to specify "full-content" or "excerpts". And both feeds should
accept a categrory argument.
3. Do we want the site wide feed to be the default? or should Roller
admins have to enable it when they want it?
I think each Roller site should also have two primary feeds that
exist in a standard location: one for most recent entries and one
for most recent comments. For both feeds, a global admin should
be able to: 1) turn the feed on or off and 2) specify "full-content" or
"excerpts". A category parameter should work here too.
4. Should the rss/atom feed for the main blog only pertain to that
weblog? or should it possibly pertain to a different set of data, like
the site wide feed or planet feed? if it always pertains to the weblog
then other feeds need their own url path <weblog>/feed/<something>
That is the question I'm trying to answer. My current thinking is that
every blog should have those two standard feeds, but bloggers should
be free to define additional feeds.
suggestions ...
technically, as far as our rendering is concerned, there is no
difference between a weblog page and a weblog feed. both are just
content to be rendered from a template. the only difference right now
is that we don't let users manage their feed templates, instead we do
that for them.
That's not entirely true. For newsfeeds we can determine the
last-modified date by using the timestamp of the most recent entry.
For weblog pages, we have to use website.lastModified which is
more of a blunt instrument.
if we really want to give users truly flexible control over their feeds
then i suggest we simply move the feeds to become weblog templates just
like pages are now. to make this happen i think all we would really
need to do is add 2 fields to the weblogpage table ...
* content type - to allow users to specify if the feed is rss, atom, etc.
* page type - to specify if the template represents a "feed" or a "page".
we then make use of the existing "link" attribute of a weblog template
to complete the picture. this way when an incoming request for
<weblog>/feed/foo comes in we simply lookup a template named "foo" with
a page type of "feed" and render that template. these templates would
be editable as part of normal template editing interface, and we could
also lock down certain feeds that we prefer people not edit, like atom
and rss.
I like that and I think it will work much better than any feedspec string
or UI that we can come up with -- and it doesn't preclude someday
putting a feed builder UI in place.
then when someone wants to add a new feed, like the site wide feed or
planet feed, they just define a new template of type "feed", give it a
link value that they want and define the contents however they want it
to be rendered.
one thing to consider though is if this is really a good idea? is this
really something that is desired from an enterprise blogging solution?
this would be quite a bit of change just to support a site wide feed. a
lot of this sounds nice to me, but i'm not sure it's really needed.
Such flexibility is defintely needed for the frontpage blog and you've
described a good way of implementing it -- why not make it available to
all blogs? Bloggers already have the ability to define new feeds via
templates, this just formalizes the process and puts feeds in a
standard place in the URL scheme.
Anybody else want to comment? I'd like to attempt to write these
ideas up in the Atlas proposal.
- Dave
