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Module Monday: RSS Field Formatters

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Drupal's built-in support for generating RSS feeds has long been an easy selling point. Do you have content? If so, Drupal will generate a feed of it, easy-peasy! Unfortunately, that RSS support hasn't kept up with the flexibility of Drupal's FieldAPI. The RSS format supports extensions to handle data types like file attachments, location data, and so on. By default, though, Drupal, jams all of your custom field data into the body of the RSS feed as simple text. That's where RSS Field Formatters comes in.

Screenshot of administration screen

RSS Field Formatters is a collection of slick formatters for Date, Geo Location, User Reference, Taxonomy, File Upload, and Media fields. Just set up your content type with the fields you'd normally use -- then, for the content type's "RSS" build mode, select the RSS-specific formatters for the fields you'd like to appear in proper feed elements.

Screenshot of the RSS feed

The results aren't flashy, unless you're an XML aficionado, but the improvement is important. If you're using RSS your RSS feed to move content from one site to another, the properly-formatted data fields can be imported more efficiently. In addition, geolocation and media attachments can be parsed and presented to users by many news feed readers: it's always better to pass along the data in a format they can work with.

RSS Field Formatters is smooth, easy to set up, and does a great job of sprucing up your RSS feeds with complex data that would otherwise go to waste.

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About Drupal Sun

Drupal Sun is an Evolving Web project. It allows you to:

  • Do full-text search on all the articles in Drupal Planet (thanks to Apache Solr)
  • Facet based on tags, author, or feed
  • Flip through articles quickly (with j/k or arrow keys) to find what you're interested in
  • View the entire article text inline, or in the context of the site where it was created

See the blog post at Evolving Web

Evolving Web