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SMF – XML, RSS and RSS2 Feeds

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My partners and I have been running Simple Machines forums lately for various projects and really like the board software as opposed to many of the other ones that are on the market.  For example PHPBB is notorious for being defaced by hackers and also leaves a lot to be desired in the realm of XSS exposure. 

Over the past few years we have learned the value of RSS Feeds, this post on the simple machines forums shows you how to create RSS feeds for your Simple Machines Forum installation.  I thought that it would be worthwhile to post this here (also so that I can locate it quickly in the future)…

One of the best features in SMF is its news feeds. However, many people aren’t aware of how many options there are, or that this is even available. So, here’s a list of available options and what they do…

First, make sure you’ve enabled the feeds:

  • Admin -> News and Newsletters –> Settings
  • Check the box next to "Enable XML/RSS News".
  • The "Maximum post length" value determines how many characters of a post are output in the feeds. The default value (255) is fine for now

Now, on to the fun stuff. All of the XML content is accessed via the ".xml" action… Other formats can be achieved by adding one of the following to the URL:

  • ;type=atom – Atom
  • ;type=rdf – RDF
  • ;type=rss – RSS 0.91
  • ;type=rss2 – RSS 2.0

The default feed is the 5 most recent posts:
http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?action=.xml

There are several "sub-actions" available to this action, specifying exactly what to display:

Recent Posts (displays the most recent posts that you can see)
"Sub-action": recent

  • Default: Shows 5 most recent posts
  • Available options:
    limit=x – display the "x" most recent posts (if number is less than 5, it will display 5. If number is larger than 255, it will display 255).
    board=y – display only the recent posts from board "y"
    boards=x,y,z – display only the recent posts from the specified boards
    c=x or c=x,y,z – display only the recent posts from boards in the specified category/categories
  • Example: http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?action=.xml;sa=recent;board=72;limit=10

News (displays the first post from the most recent topics that you can see)
"Sub-action": news

Members (displays most recent members):
"Sub-action": members

Profile (displays the "profile summary" data in a nice XML feed for the specified user)
"Sub-action": profile

Now – you’re probably wondering what you can do with this. Quite a bit actually.You can syndicate this stuff by giving people these URLs to use on their sites (they will need to have their own RSS parser to deal with it though – CaRP is a good free one (requires PHP)). You can also use PHP’s XML Parser Functions to format the output the way you want it (although you can also do this using SSI.php). There are also several free sites that will parse the feeds for you, including www.rss2javascript.com and www.feedburner.com.

You can also subscribe to these feeds through an XML reader, Firefox, Thunderbird or any other software that supports XML or RSS feeds (note – Outlook and Outlook Express do not support this…) – you will need to have either "type=rss" or "type=rss2" somewhere in the URL for it to work. If you would like to know how to set this up in Firefox or Thunderbird, let me know. Enjoy!

EDIT: Updated post to reflect options available in 1.1.
EDIT again: Fixed typo (";type=rss – RSS 2.0" -> ";type=rss2 – RSS 2.0" – thanks to Sarge for pointing that out)

« Last Edit: April 13, 2008, 01:30:38 AM by SleePy »

Getting the Most Out of SMF – XML, RSS and RSS2 (and Atom and RDF) feeds

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