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...
Enable 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
URL options for showing XML content
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:
The default feed is the 5 most recent posts: http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?action=.xml
Sub-actions
Add sa=<sub-action> to the URL query string to use these sub-actions.
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
- Available options:
- limit=x - display only "x" items
- board=y - display only news topics from board "y"
- boards=x,y,z - display only news topics from the specified boards
- c=x or c=x,y,z - display only news topics from boards in the specified category/categories
- Example: http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?action=.xml;sa=news;board=72;limit=10
Members
Displays most recent members:
- Sub-action: members
- Available options:
- limit=x - display only the "x" most recent members
- Example: http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?action=.xml;sa=members;limit=10
Profile
Displays the "profile summary" data in a nice XML feed for the specified user:
- Sub-action: profile
- Required option:
- u=x - display the profile info for user whose ID is "x"
- Example: http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?action=.xml;sa=profile;u=150
How to use RSS feeds
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. They can use CaRP (php-based) or PHP's XML Parser Functions. You can use one of several free sites that will parse the feeds for your users, including www.rss2javascript.com and www.feedburner.com.
You and your members 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...) - use either "type=rss" or "type=rss2" somewhere in the URL.
