Support and default to generating Atom feeds
This includes several breaking changes, but they’re easy to adjust for.
Atom 1.0 is superior to RSS 2.0 in a number of ways, both technical and
legal, though information from the last decade is hard to find.
http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/Rss20AndAtom10Compared
has some info which is probably still mostly correct.
How do RSS and Atom compare in terms of implementation support? The
impression I get is that proper Atom support in normal content websites
has been universal for over twelve years, but that support in podcasts
was not quite so good, but getting there, over twelve years ago. I have
no more recent facts or figures; no one talks about this stuff these
days. I remember investigating this stuff back in 2011–2013 and coming
to the same conclusion. At that time, I went with Atom on websites and
RSS in podcasts. Now I’d just go full Atom and hang any podcast tools
that don’t support Atom, because Atom’s semantics truly are much better.
In light of all this, I make the bold recommendation to default to Atom.
Nonetheless, for compatibility for existing users, and for those that
have Opinions, I’ve retained the RSS template, so that you can escape
the breaking change easily.
I personally prefer to give feeds a basename that doesn’t mention “Atom”
or “RSS”, e.g. “feed.xml”. I’ll be doing that myself, as I’ll be using
my own template with more Atom features anyway, like author information,
taxonomies and making the title field HTML.
Some notes about the Atom feed template:
- I went with atom.xml rather than something like feed.atom (the .atom
file format being registered for this purpose by RFC4287) due to lack
of confidence that it’ll be served with the right MIME type. .xml is a
safer default.
- It might be nice to get Zola’s version number into the <generator>
tag. Not for any particularly good reason, y’know. Just picture it:
<generator uri="https://www.getzola.org/" version="0.10.0">
Zola
</generator>
- I’d like to get taxonomies into the feed, but this requires exposing a
little more info than is currently exposed. I think it’d require
`TaxonomyConfig` to preferably have a new member `permalink` added
(which should be equivalent to something like `config.base_url ~ "/" ~
taxonomy.slug ~ "/"`), and for the feed to get all the taxonomies
passed into it (`taxonomies: HashMap<String, TaxonomyTerm>`).
Then, the template could be like this, inside the entry:
{% for taxonomy, terms in page.taxonomies %}
{% for term in terms %}
<category scheme="{{ taxonomies[taxonomy].permalink }}"
term="{{ term.slug }}" label="{{ term.name }}" />
{% endfor %}
{% endfor %}
Other remarks:
- I have added a date field `extra.updated` to my posts and include that
in the feed; I’ve observed others with a similar field. I believe this
should be included as an official field. I’m inclined to add author to
at least config.toml, too, for feeds.
- We need to have a link from the docs to the source of the built-in
templates, to help people that wish to alter it.
2019-08-11 10:25:24 +00:00
+++
title = "Feeds"
weight = 50
aliases = ["/documentation/templates/rss/"]
+++
If the site `config.toml` file sets `generate_feed = true` , then Zola will
generate a feed file for the site, named according to the `feed_filename`
setting in `config.toml` , which defaults to `atom.xml` . Given the feed filename
`atom.xml` , the generated file will live at `base_url/atom.xml` , based upon the
`atom.xml` file in the `templates` directory, or the built-in Atom template.
`feed_filename` can be set to any value, but built-in templates are provided
for `atom.xml` (in the preferred Atom 1.0 format), and `rss.xml` (in the RSS
2.0 format). If you choose a different filename (e.g. `feed.xml` ), you will
need to provide a template yourself.
**Only pages with a date will be available.**
2020-04-03 07:36:30 +00:00
The feed template gets five variables:
Support and default to generating Atom feeds
This includes several breaking changes, but they’re easy to adjust for.
Atom 1.0 is superior to RSS 2.0 in a number of ways, both technical and
legal, though information from the last decade is hard to find.
http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/Rss20AndAtom10Compared
has some info which is probably still mostly correct.
How do RSS and Atom compare in terms of implementation support? The
impression I get is that proper Atom support in normal content websites
has been universal for over twelve years, but that support in podcasts
was not quite so good, but getting there, over twelve years ago. I have
no more recent facts or figures; no one talks about this stuff these
days. I remember investigating this stuff back in 2011–2013 and coming
to the same conclusion. At that time, I went with Atom on websites and
RSS in podcasts. Now I’d just go full Atom and hang any podcast tools
that don’t support Atom, because Atom’s semantics truly are much better.
In light of all this, I make the bold recommendation to default to Atom.
Nonetheless, for compatibility for existing users, and for those that
have Opinions, I’ve retained the RSS template, so that you can escape
the breaking change easily.
I personally prefer to give feeds a basename that doesn’t mention “Atom”
or “RSS”, e.g. “feed.xml”. I’ll be doing that myself, as I’ll be using
my own template with more Atom features anyway, like author information,
taxonomies and making the title field HTML.
Some notes about the Atom feed template:
- I went with atom.xml rather than something like feed.atom (the .atom
file format being registered for this purpose by RFC4287) due to lack
of confidence that it’ll be served with the right MIME type. .xml is a
safer default.
- It might be nice to get Zola’s version number into the <generator>
tag. Not for any particularly good reason, y’know. Just picture it:
<generator uri="https://www.getzola.org/" version="0.10.0">
Zola
</generator>
- I’d like to get taxonomies into the feed, but this requires exposing a
little more info than is currently exposed. I think it’d require
`TaxonomyConfig` to preferably have a new member `permalink` added
(which should be equivalent to something like `config.base_url ~ "/" ~
taxonomy.slug ~ "/"`), and for the feed to get all the taxonomies
passed into it (`taxonomies: HashMap<String, TaxonomyTerm>`).
Then, the template could be like this, inside the entry:
{% for taxonomy, terms in page.taxonomies %}
{% for term in terms %}
<category scheme="{{ taxonomies[taxonomy].permalink }}"
term="{{ term.slug }}" label="{{ term.name }}" />
{% endfor %}
{% endfor %}
Other remarks:
- I have added a date field `extra.updated` to my posts and include that
in the feed; I’ve observed others with a similar field. I believe this
should be included as an official field. I’m inclined to add author to
at least config.toml, too, for feeds.
- We need to have a link from the docs to the source of the built-in
templates, to help people that wish to alter it.
2019-08-11 10:25:24 +00:00
2020-04-03 07:36:30 +00:00
- `config` : the site config
Support and default to generating Atom feeds
This includes several breaking changes, but they’re easy to adjust for.
Atom 1.0 is superior to RSS 2.0 in a number of ways, both technical and
legal, though information from the last decade is hard to find.
http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/Rss20AndAtom10Compared
has some info which is probably still mostly correct.
How do RSS and Atom compare in terms of implementation support? The
impression I get is that proper Atom support in normal content websites
has been universal for over twelve years, but that support in podcasts
was not quite so good, but getting there, over twelve years ago. I have
no more recent facts or figures; no one talks about this stuff these
days. I remember investigating this stuff back in 2011–2013 and coming
to the same conclusion. At that time, I went with Atom on websites and
RSS in podcasts. Now I’d just go full Atom and hang any podcast tools
that don’t support Atom, because Atom’s semantics truly are much better.
In light of all this, I make the bold recommendation to default to Atom.
Nonetheless, for compatibility for existing users, and for those that
have Opinions, I’ve retained the RSS template, so that you can escape
the breaking change easily.
I personally prefer to give feeds a basename that doesn’t mention “Atom”
or “RSS”, e.g. “feed.xml”. I’ll be doing that myself, as I’ll be using
my own template with more Atom features anyway, like author information,
taxonomies and making the title field HTML.
Some notes about the Atom feed template:
- I went with atom.xml rather than something like feed.atom (the .atom
file format being registered for this purpose by RFC4287) due to lack
of confidence that it’ll be served with the right MIME type. .xml is a
safer default.
- It might be nice to get Zola’s version number into the <generator>
tag. Not for any particularly good reason, y’know. Just picture it:
<generator uri="https://www.getzola.org/" version="0.10.0">
Zola
</generator>
- I’d like to get taxonomies into the feed, but this requires exposing a
little more info than is currently exposed. I think it’d require
`TaxonomyConfig` to preferably have a new member `permalink` added
(which should be equivalent to something like `config.base_url ~ "/" ~
taxonomy.slug ~ "/"`), and for the feed to get all the taxonomies
passed into it (`taxonomies: HashMap<String, TaxonomyTerm>`).
Then, the template could be like this, inside the entry:
{% for taxonomy, terms in page.taxonomies %}
{% for term in terms %}
<category scheme="{{ taxonomies[taxonomy].permalink }}"
term="{{ term.slug }}" label="{{ term.name }}" />
{% endfor %}
{% endfor %}
Other remarks:
- I have added a date field `extra.updated` to my posts and include that
in the feed; I’ve observed others with a similar field. I believe this
should be included as an official field. I’m inclined to add author to
at least config.toml, too, for feeds.
- We need to have a link from the docs to the source of the built-in
templates, to help people that wish to alter it.
2019-08-11 10:25:24 +00:00
- `feed_url` : the full url to that specific feed
2019-10-07 14:39:33 +00:00
- `last_updated` : the most recent `updated` or `date` field of any post
2020-04-03 07:36:30 +00:00
- `pages` : see [page variables ](@/documentation/templates/pages-sections.md#page-variables )
for a detailed description of what this contains
- `lang` : the language code that applies to all of the pages in the feed,
if the site is multilingual, or `config.default_language` if it is not
Feeds for taxonomy terms get two more variables, using types from the
[taxonomies templates ](@/documentation/templates/taxonomies.md ):
- `taxonomy` : of type `TaxonomyConfig`
- `term` : of type `TaxonomyTerm` , but without `term.pages` (use `pages` instead)
2020-08-12 07:20:16 +00:00
2020-08-27 18:21:37 +00:00
You can also enable separate feeds for each section by setting the
`generate_feed` variable to true in the respective section's front matter.
Section feeds will use the same template as indicated in the `config.toml` file.
Section feeds, in addition to the five feed template variables, get the
`section` variable from the [section
template](@/documentation/templates/pages-sections.md).
2020-08-12 07:20:16 +00:00
Enable feed autodiscovery allows feed readers and browsers to notify user about a RSS or Atom feed available on your web site. So it is easier for user to subscribe.
As an example this is how it looks like using [Firefox ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Firefox ) [Livemarks ](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/livemarks/?src=search ) addon.
You can enable posts autodiscovery modifying your blog `base.html` template adding the following code in between the `<head>` tags.
```html
{% block rss %}
2020-10-21 11:00:16 +00:00
< link rel = "alternate" type = "application/rss+xml" title = "RSS" href = "{{/* get_url(path=" rss . xml " , trailing_slash = false) * / } } " >
2020-08-12 07:20:16 +00:00
{% endblock %}
```
You can as well use an Atom feed using `type="application/atom+xml"` and `path="atom.xml"` .
All pages on your site will refer to your post feed.
In order to enable the tag feeds as well, you can overload the `block rss` using the following code in your `tags/single.html` template.
```html
{% block rss %}
{% set rss_path = "tags/" ~ term.name ~ "/rss.xml" %}
2020-10-21 11:00:16 +00:00
< link rel = "alternate" type = "application/rss+xml" title = "RSS" href = "{{/* get_url(path=rss_path, trailing_slash=false) */}}" >
2020-08-12 07:20:16 +00:00
{% endblock rss %}
```
Each tag page will refer to it's dedicated feed.
