Need help with generating RSS file

Nuke Cadet Joined: Nov 03, 2007 Posts: 4

I am having trouble loading the backend.php file. Can someone please take a look and see if you can help. I am running nuke 7.9

The file is : www.politibyte.com/backend.php

I would really be thankful for any help you could give.

Nuke Cadet Joined: Jun 18, 2008 Posts: 7

I need to know how to get backendforums.php working also. It's returning this:

http://mydomain.com/postt11.html and this page doesn't exist. It's showing the forum title just fine in the feed, it's just linking to a non-existing page.

How do I configure this thing? There's no instructions with the download package. It's the same one that's being used by nukecops and I'd like to use it also.

Any help MOST appreciated. Thanks.

Nuke Cadet Joined: Jun 18, 2008 Posts: 7

I figured it out! Yay for me!

I figured out that

Code:

echo "<link>$nukeurl/postt$topic_id.html</link>\n";

needs to be replace with this

Code:

echo "<link>$nukeurl/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=$topic_id</link>\n";

I tried backend.php and it worked without a hitch, so looked at the code and noticed this

Code:

&

instead of "&"...so you need to use & and not just an ampersand (&) to the url of your forums!

Site Admin Joined: Aug 17, 2003 Posts: 12482

I'm guessing whatever you downloaded from here is assuming you are using GoogleTap. That is why the links are written that way

Nuke Cadet Joined: Jun 18, 2008 Posts: 7

Guess I'll have to google "googletap" since I never heard of it and have no clue what that is.

I know that some html/coding requires special characters to be ascii so that's when I saw the URL in the backend.php, with the ampersand in ascii, that's when realized that the URL needed to have the special characters in ascii so I changed it.

However....There were other issues I discovered...I was having problems with the feeds working on IE7. No problems with FF, but IE was giving me the "Does not support DTD" error.

The interesting thing is that this exact issue was posted about with a completely different script I am running (video sharing) and it was cited that the same DTD problem existed with that script as well...a solution was posted which I "translated" to my phpnuke site that was having the same exact issue.

If you're having this issue, open backend.php and in backendforums.php in order to get it working in IE7 (was getting DTD errors in IE7)

HOW I FIXED MY PHPNUKE RSS FEEDS

Open backend.php and backendforums.php.

FIND:

Code:

echo "<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"ISO-8859-1\"?>\n\n";

echo "<!DOCTYPE rss PUBLIC \"-//Netscape Communications//DTD RSS

0.91//EN\"\n";

echo " \"http://my.netscape.com/publish/formats/rss-0.91.dtd\">\n\n";

echo "<rss version=\"0.91\">\n\n";

REPLACE:

Code:

echo "<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"UTF-8\"?>\n";

echo "<rss version=\"2.0\" xmlns:atom=\"http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom\">\n";

In header.php I added the following line above the already existing one for backend.php:

Code:

echo "<link rel=\"alternate\" type=\"application/rss+xml\" title=\"Forums Feed\" href=\"backendforums.php\">\n";

As far as I know, everything is working fine now in both FF and IE7. Very Happy

I hope this information is helpful to whoever comes after me.

Premium Joined: Jul 17, 2003 Posts: 49

Thanks for posting the resolution for this issue.

By the way, it looks like you're not using rewritten URLs (aka Google Tap, ShortLinks, etc), but the backend script was expecting that.

You (or others) might also wish to look at nukeFEED, which gives you the ability to generate feeds in multiple formats including ATOM and RSS 2.0 for most types of Nuke content. You can publish your feeds through feedburner.com, configure how many items to include in the feed, include content at various levels and more.

Nuke Cadet Joined: Jun 18, 2008 Posts: 7

Thanks, I'll check it out.

From my continued research, it turns out that you need to "escape" some code in RSS feeds as certain characters (like the one I cited previously) are considered "illegal" in XML (don't know what GoogleTap and all that has to do with that, but this is what I found out). that is, you need to use

Code:

&

instead of just

Code:

&

which is explained here in step 6 of the process of creating an RSS feed:

http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=56

To quote step 6:

Quote:

An RSS file is an XML file. Some characters are illegal in XML. So you have to 'escape' them, that is, insert a text string in their place. Here is the list I use (not all of these are strictly required, but using this full list ensures maximum safety).

& - replace all instances of '&' with the following: &
- Don't forget the URL! Many URLs have ampersands in them.
- If a link element is http://www.mysite.com/index.cgi?n=4&p=5 then you must change it to http://www.mysite.com/index.cgi?n=4&p=5

" - change every full quote to "
- For example: He shouted, "Fire!" becomes, He shouted, "Fire!"

' - change every apostraphe to '
- For example: It's his bike. becomes It's his bike.

> - change every 'greater than' character to > - but DO NOT change them in the tags.
- For example, <description> am > three feet tall</description> becomes <description>I am > three feet tall</description>

< - change every 'less than' character tag to < - but DO NOT change them in the tags
- For example: "<description>I have < five dollars</description> becomes <description>I had < five dollars</description>

Another cool thing I found is an RSS Validator and the RSS generated by backend.php is considered a webpage and not an RSS feed (according to the validator) http://feedvalidator.org/

Premium Joined: Jul 17, 2003 Posts: 49

Yes, we did pretty extensive testing on nukeFEED to make sure the XML is valid / escaped for the different supported formats.

Premium Joined: Jul 17, 2003 Posts: 49

One of the problems with generating feeds from Nuke content is that some distributions of Nuke don't enforce compliance in the source content, so the feed generator must make it so.

Nuke Cadet Joined: Jun 18, 2008 Posts: 7

Thanks. My main problem was with the URL to the info being fed, which was making it some .html document when my forums is located at a .php page. When I tried to "fix" it, that's when I found out all that stuff about the ampersand and with the way I put it in, it wasn't valid which caused the entire feed to "break" (until I "escaped" it and then all was well).