[development] Core feed publishing

[Moshe Weitzman]

it would be nice to tidy this up as you suggest. have a look at the 
output formats issue: http://drupal.org/node/145551.

you might also take a look at Views style plugins since Views is what 
generates node lists on most sites these days.

beerfan wrote:
> Feed publishing, and the RSS format in particular, is currently
> tightly coupled with the node module. Because of this supporting Atom
> or extending feed functionality with custom modules isn't as clean as
> it should be. For example, adding a name-space to a node feed requires
> replacing default feeds with custom feeds instead of simply "theming"
> the output of feeds as you would do with every other form of content
> display. Publishing only Atom feeds (and disabling RSS) is impossible.
> I would like to see feed publishing become more generic and more
> extensible in the core and I believe there has been discussion around
> this in the past.
> 
> Ideally, feed publishing would be a generic module or api which would
> support the following needs.
> 
> 1. Multiple arbitrary feed formats (RSS, Atom) with a default
> 2. Custom name-spaces and elements (possibly via themes or hooks)
> 3. Publish comment feeds or any other arbitrary content (watchdog
> events, users, etc.)
> 4. The ability to provide a feed of any arbitrary set of content
> (e.g., view, node-queue)
> 5. Optimize publishing for very high traffic feeds (e.g., caching or
> saving as static xml file)
> 6. The ability to disable feeds
> 
> It is currently possibly to cobble together most of the above
> functionality with views.module, commentrss.module, and atom.module
> but the solution is sub-optimal for many reasons.
> 
> I recently started creating a feed.module against HEAD with the hope
> that it could turn into a core module which would make feed publishing
> more flexible and collect all feed formatting and publishing code and
> eliminate the RSS publishing functionality in node.module. However,
> since 6.x was just frozen there's probably no hope of introducing this
> now but I'd still like to re-float the idea and get some feedback. In
> particular, I'm curious if anyone else is already working on such a
> project, if there are any side-effects of separating feed publishing
> from node.module that I haven't considered, or if this problem might
> be better approached using views as the complete solution (not really
> viable since views is not a core module). Please ignore the fact that
> this can't be implemented for 6.x.
> 
> As an example of an issue I have faced, feedburner.com adds a "number
> of comments for this entry" if the feed includes the "wfw:commentsRss"
> element pointing to the comment feed for the entry. I have modified
> the commentrss.module to add the element to the node feed but there is
> no way to add the "wfw" name-space to the node feed without replacing
> it with a custom feed so I had to add the name-space to each instance
> of the "commentRss" element.
> 
> Cheers,
> Chris Cook