Atom feed generator (Page 1 of 2)

Well, couldn't find naff all else in the way of Atom generators, so adapted that RSS generator off the A.K site. It's passed the output validation tests too. With it being based on that code, it has the same category/forum/topic specific abilites. Sorted the non guest forum problem that caused a parser error to come up in the reader whilst I was at it. It just outputs a standard no alterations feed page now instead of dumping out rather ungracefully, as in the original RSS script. So......, what's the opinion? (It's the green icon for Atom, btw).

http://forums.bauchan.org/testforum/forums.php

Every atom feed I've tried so far does that, (including this one). . You have to drag the icon, (or add the feed address manually), into the reader. Firefox does exactly the same. I'm still trying to figure out whether that is how it should behave, or whether there's another header type needs adding, or suchlike. That php file it prompts one to download is actually the output of the generator, and not the script itself.

I would expect the atom feed to open a page in IE which shows the xml output and not prompt me for a file download which is what the rss feed on your site does. Have you had a look at the PunBB 1.3's atom feed, that works exactly the same as the rss feed.

It works in Firefox for me. I have Feedreader as my aggregator and associated with the feeds URL types, so it works just fine.

Tested in Opera 9, Safari 3 (Win) and FeedDemon. Works fine.

While it might not prompt you to download the file anymore, you are now using an incorrect mime type to serve atom feeds. They should always be sent as…

application/atom+xml

…just like you used originally.

What I would have done is to do content negotiation to determine if the user agent accepts said mime type. That's what I do on one of my sites (though I haven't done anything with the extern.php script yet) and it works very well as you can see if you try opening the site in IE and a proper browser like Opera or FF

Really, all you should have to check for is whether or not

application/xml

exists in the $_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT'] string.

Cheers for the advice chaps.  Have just added a HTTP_ACCEPT statement to the atom script:

if (stristr($_SERVER["HTTP_ACCEPT"], "application/xml"))
{
        header ("Content-Type: application/atom+xml; charset=utf-8");
}
else
{
        header ("Content-type: text/xml; charset=utf-8");
}

and popped that on the testforum server. Is that code correct in it's design? Is it working as it should now? (I'm still getting used to this bit with regards to testing, so I'm not overly sure).

Thanks again for all the help on this one. I highly appreciate it.

Matt

Cheers. I'll get that hardcoded charset altered to use lang_encoding too. Thanks for the pointer. Btw, like that theme on your site.

Like the Submerged one. The left pinky grows on you after a short while too. Those two have that something.

Must admit, I've no real need for Atom either, but thought it only fair to offer the more O.S of the two formats too. Must admit, having messed about with it, I do actually prefer the layout of the Atom tags and such to the RSS ones. Easier to adapt to and work with. If you want that Atom script to play with, I can post it up. I think I've ironed out any little niggles/wrinkles now.

Could I pick your brains a tad more btw? Firstly, the Atom and RSS scripts. Should they preferably have the extension .xml rather than .php, and then get the webserver to execute them as with .php scripts?

Secondly, how do you manage the .php/.xml part with regards to the forum/site itself? Since having a diddle and look at your site, decided to have a go at getting the forum served up in xml or html, dependant on the browser. Have it almost working fine, apart from the fact that a XML capable browser will try to download the .php file rather than just open it, whereas, obviously, a .xml file it will open and display as it should.

Cheers,

Matt

Are you including the XML declaration? If not, it needs to be the very first thing on the page. Just add…

echo '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="'.$lang_common['lang_encoding'].'" ?>';

…as the first thing you echo out from header.php.

Also, the extension doesn't matter one bit as long as you are sending the document with the correct mime type, and correctly identifies the document as xml.

Hehe, stuff like that happens to all of us from time to time

By the way, I don't know if you are aware of it but when you are serving the pages as application/xhtml+xml the tags in the your style sheets are now case sensitive so if you haven't done so already, it's a good idea to look over them. Also, you need to serve javascripts slightly different depending on if you're using text/html or xml. In XML, they should be enclosed in a CDATA section, instead of the usual html comment tags.