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RSS, Atom, XML syndication feeds (tracking)
Open, LowPublicFeature

Description

Author: ilyanep

Description:
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.


Version: unspecified
Severity: enhancement
See Also:
T56829

Details

Reference
bz3646

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Event Timeline

bzimport raised the priority of this task from to Low.Nov 21 2014, 8:51 PM
bzimport set Reference to bz3646.
bzimport added a subscriber: Unknown Object (MLST).

marcus wrote:

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.

duncan-wikimedia wrote:

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.

rowan.collins wrote:

See also: bug 472, bug 943, bug 4182
[Perhaps we could do with a "component" or a tracking bug for Feed (RSS/Atom)
issues?]

avarab wrote:

(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?

ilyanep wrote:

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 :\

robchur wrote:

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.

ilyanep wrote:

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.

markj9public wrote:

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.

rowan wrote:

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?

Any objections to convert this bug into a Phabricator project?

Danny_B set Security to None.

Proposing to decline this ticket. Looks like nobody is interested enough in that task to consistently triage every incoming ticket and add that parent task dependency. Might be another example of categorizing for the sake of categorization but no real use case. (Quoting from T102495#7092434.)

consistently triage every incoming ticket and add that parent task dependency

Why would that be a goal? If it were, that would indeed be a case of:

categorizing for the sake of categorization but no real use case

This is simply a tracking bug to keep track of some of the work which remains to be done for a good experience with RSS, Atom and XML syndication feeds. It provides a valid list of tasks for anyone interested. The matter has remained pretty much the same for a while, so it's normal that there isn't much new to say. However, news of the death of RSS were greatly exaggerated and even Google now plans to re-join the 21st century, so there might be more activity in the future. Whoever starts actively working on the matter can change the list of tasks as needed.

Discontinuing this tracking bug would not help any future contributor. It might also be helpful to remove the warning which claims this tracking ticket is about to be superseded; I imagine it discouraged some contribution (with no clear benefit that I can see).

This is simply a tracking bug to keep track of some of the work which remains to be done for a good experience with RSS, Atom and XML syndication feeds.

@Nemo_bis: That means you'd close this ticket as resolved once its remaining open subtasks are resolved? In that case, this is not "neverending" by definition.

Aklapper changed the subtype of this task from "Task" to "Feature Request".Feb 4 2022, 11:02 AM