I’m a big proponent of RSS feeds, especially to monitor things like mailing lists and discussion boards. When implementing FuseTalk Basic Edition for the Rocky Mountain Adobe User Group, I was really disappointed with the out-of-box RSS feed options.

So I made my own. You can download them.

What prompted this maelstrom of ColdFusion coding? The RSS generation files in FuseTalk Basic edition didn’t offer the breadth of options or depth of content that I wanted to give our members. Also, the original code didn’t produce a feed that the W3C Feed Validation Service considered to be valid. (Don’t believe me, see how the RSS from the Adobe Forums Validates.)

Improvement 1: Use correct date format in RSS feeds

The default RSS generation for FuseTalk does not use the correct date format for RSS 2.0 validation. Instead of a pubDate syntax of: <pubDate>Tue, 10 Jun 2008 04:00:00 +0700</pubDate> FuseTalk uses the older format: <pubDate>2008-06-10 T04:00:00 +0700</pubDate>. I’ve modified the /forum/rss.cfm file to return a pubDate in the correct format.

Improvement 2: Include all forum content in RSS feed

FuseTalk’s RSS feed only includes the top-level posts. If a particular topic becomes particularly active, then users monitoring the forums via RSS will never know. The RMAUG site gives users the option to subscribe to a feed that contains all posts (top-level and replies) or just top-level posts so that they can choose their level of messaging.

Improvement 3: Aggregate all forum content into a single feed

Another annoyance for those who like to subscribe to RSS feeds to monitor the forums is that FuseTalk forces you to subscribe to many different feeds to receive all forum posts. For users who want to monitor everything, the RMAUG site has an aggregate RSS feed. In the download files, you’ll be able to create aggregate feeds for just top-level content, or that include all forum content.

Improvement 4: Use static files for RSS readers

FuseTalk uses CFM files in the URLs used by RSS readers. That’s OK if you have a small user base, but if you have 200 users subscribed to RSS feeds, and each person’s reader polls for new feeds every 15 minutes, then this page will get hit 9600 times every 12 hours! If each time that page is initiating a new query, then you’ve got a lot of unnecessary database traffic. Ick. To avoid this, the RMAUG site writes out XML files via a scheduled task. Not only that, but the XML files are actually named for the forum category that the represent, so no need to remember the category’s numeric ID. The generation files, as well as the single file that is used for the scheduled task is included in the download files.

Improvement 5: Put RSS options in the user profile

By default, users can choose which email subscriptions to use in the user profile, but RSS feed options are missing here. I modified the FuseTalk profile page to include all of the RSS options generated using the other custom tools mentioned above. Also, I went through the forum and made sure that any RSS references already in FuseTalk point to my new files. I’ve included the profile modifications in the download package, but think that if you’re modifying FuseTalk already, you can probably find the other references.

UPDATE (6/2/08): Made revision to the feeds/forum_top.cfm and feeds/forum_all.cfm files to ensure only approved messages are included in the RSS feeds.