authenticated RSS feed
I'm involved with bunch of Drupal sites which generate a lot of new collaborative content nearly every day. While they are using tracker.module to present a page of recent nodes, the amount of data is still overwhelming to get through. Sounds like a perfect use for a good RSS reader, right? The problem is, none of the content is viewable without being an authenticated user. RSS readers, like Thunderbird (the greatest unknown RSS reader :-), don't know how to log into Drupal to download the feeds. Is this something that can be solved by modifying Drupal's feeds to conform to a standard authentication method for RSS? I can certainly do the work, but am looking for collective knowledge and advice to get me up the learning curve faster and avoid building something that only works for me and my audience. I'd like to solve it generically, if possible. ..chrisxj
On 16-Jun-06, at 8:23 AM, Chris Johnson wrote:
I'm involved with bunch of Drupal sites which generate a lot of new collaborative content nearly every day. While they are using tracker.module to present a page of recent nodes, the amount of data is still overwhelming to get through. Sounds like a perfect use for a good RSS reader, right?
The problem is, none of the content is viewable without being an authenticated user. RSS readers, like Thunderbird (the greatest unknown RSS reader :-), don't know how to log into Drupal to download the feeds.
Is this something that can be solved by modifying Drupal's feeds to conform to a standard authentication method for RSS? I can certainly do the work, but am looking for collective knowledge and advice to get me up the learning curve faster and avoid building something that only works for me and my audience. I'd like to solve it generically, if possible.
The "standard auth" method is to use the network layer. The newest version of securesite does this, Chris -- using Basic Auth. Check out the groups.drupal.org site for an example -- it allows you access to all "your" feeds by having your aggregator login. Securesite has some additional issues and needs full testing on a variety of aggregators, and can use a bunch of backporting (I think...I forget if Adrian just fixed 4.7 or if it was trivial to do 4.6 as well). It's the reason I reverse bountied it in the first place.... -- Boris Mann Vancouver 778-896-2747 San Francisco 415-367-3595 SKYPE borismann http://www.bryght.com
The problem is, none of the content is viewable without being an authenticated user. RSS readers, like Thunderbird (the greatest unknown RSS reader :-), don't know how to log into Drupal to download the feeds.
Hmmmm, Lets assume for a moment that we are using Basic Authentication instead of Drupal's own. In such a case lots of RSS readers could supply a user and password - possibly even by specifying the URL in the form http://user:pass@www.site.com/path/page Presumably the RSS fetcher understands this format and supplies the username and password when the web server asks for that info. Now - this leads me to wonder whether Drupal authentication and Basic Authentication might be combined somehow - or possibly have a separate page controlled by basic authentication which is internally proxied to the Drupal RSS page. Sorry for the rambling reply :-) Alex
Op vrijdag 16 juni 2006 17:40, schreef alex@owal.co.uk:
Now - this leads me to wonder whether Drupal authentication and Basic Authentication might be combined somehow - or possibly have a separate page controlled by basic authentication which is internally proxied to the Drupal RSS page.
IMO we should just wait for RSS readers to become a bit smarter and use cookies etc. Akrgegator uses KDEs authentication, session/cookie system and it works Just Fine. Firefox (afaik the most used rss reader) uses its sessions too, which leaves us with web-based readers that cannot log in. And thunderbird. Maybe we should lay some more pressure on thunderbird instead? And on the web-based readers to provide session based, ordinary web logins? Bèr
Just a tip... I use webserverauth module and thunderbird asks for authentication the first time it retrieves RSS articles.
participants (5)
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alex＠owal.co.uk -
Boris Mann -
Bèr Kessels -
Chris Johnson -
Michelangelo Partipilo