Last modified: 2014-11-17 09:21:15 UTC
At the moment, as far as I know, mediawiki doesn't allow many options for RSS. Many people have had to write scripts. I think that MediaWiki should incorporate an RSS maker that has options such as where to divide different items, what to put in the summary, etc. I realize this would be a ginormic project to undertake, which is why I'm setting the priority to low, so if one of the developers is bored, feel free to do somethihng like this.
I agree that MediaWiki should be more XML friendly. The current xml output of, say, Wikipedia is quite strange, and requires a lot of further string parsing. You should be able to get an RSS feed of all articles in a particular category, of all subcategories in a category, using the same parsing classes that are already in MediaWiki, in combination with an XML serializer. It is a big project, but a very important one, because open content models like Wikipedia should make it as easy as possible to use and process the content as possible.
I think having RSS feeds of any/every/most content pages would be great. I could certainly use the feature for mediawiki when used as a docu tool... I found this tonite, worth mentioning... not sure if it works or not: http://wiki.case.edu/CaseWiki:RSS_Feeds It is a page about generating rss feeds for almost any page (at least category pages). Check it out.
See also: bug 472, bug 943, bug 4182 [Perhaps we could do with a "component" or a tracking bug for Feed (RSS/Atom) issues?]
(In reply to comment #0) > At the moment, as far as I know, mediawiki doesn't allow many options for RSS. > Many people have had to write scripts. I think that MediaWiki should incorporate > an RSS maker that has options such as where to divide different items, what to > put in the summary, etc. I realize this would be a ginormic project to > undertake, which is why I'm setting the priority to low, so if one of the > developers is bored, feel free to do somethihng like this. Could you elaborate on how this is supposed to work?
I'm saying that when you're [most likely the webmaster/dev] making a feed...you have an interface where you can tell it: --What page the feed should be coming from [let's say WP:Reference Desk] --How to seperate the 'articles' [A few preset options, such as headlines are titles and text is the articles, and then maybe a regexp field to add your own] (so let's say in the RD we want headlines [==...==] to be titles and a snippet of the text to be a summary) --How to date the fields [I'm sure it wouldn't be hard to find the first timestamp to make a date field, and the last timestamp to make an updated fields, but perhaps give the user an option on which timestamp they want] Then the software would take this and update the feed [once every hour, day, month?]. Also, a feature could be added to support 'pages in x category' or 'pages with x template' (the latter could be useful for wikinews). And since this could be locked down to only the webmaster/developer it wouldn't consume server resources if the webmaster is bandwidth conscious enough. I'd help out with this project, but every day I find that i know less and less about PHP :\
If it's the case that the developers would be doing it, it would probably be less effort for them to code a specific extension to provide the required feed.
But then the end user (non-wmf) would have no access to this feature because they' d have to code it themselves as well
Turning this into a tracking bug.
Would it be possible to include the categories of a page within the RSS Feed for recent changes? I've seen most people just create multiple rss category nodes within each item.
I think that most of what you say can already be done with Semantic MediaWiki: http://semantic-mediawiki.org/
There are plenty of matched for RSS in bugzilla that are not linked here. I would create a separate component ( https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/describecomponents.cgi?product=MediaWiki ) called RSS/Atom/Feeds or something... just feeds? RSS?
Adding 'tracking' keyword.
