The Bakery Everything CakePHP

Introduction

If your application includes any sort of internal messaging or notifications, RSS is for you. For forums and blogs, feeds have become a functional requirement. Integrating RSS feeds in your application helps users keep tabs on how things are coming along, with out having to check into the site constantly.

This tutorial will help you set up a basic RSS feed by helping you craft a controller action, and its associated view (and layout).

Getting the Data

One of the more common uses for RSS is to notify users of new posts on a blog. The controller work to be done is rather simple: we just need to get a relevant list of articles, sorted by the date they were published.

Controller Class:

Download code <?php 
class ArticlesController extends AppController
{
    var $name = 'Articles';
    var $helpers = array('Time');

    function rss()
    {
        $this->layout = 'xml';
        $this->set('articles', $this->Article->findAll('Article.published = 1', null, 'Article.published_date DESC', 15));
    }
}
?>
There are a few things here that will help us when we get around to crafting the view and layout for this action. The Time helper will be needed for some magical conversion to GMT time, and the Download code $this->layout instruction will use a new layout we'll create next.

The Download code $this->set() fetches the 15 most recently published articles.

The Layout and View

Because we dont want our RSS feed placed inside an applications default XHTML layout, we'll create a new layout for XML, at /app/views/layouts/xml.thtml.

View Template:

Download code
<?php header('Content-type: text/xml'); ?>
<?php echo $content_for_layout; ?>

Pretty simple, right? We just assign a different content-type header, and spit out the feed. Let's take a look at the view. All we need to do here is craft the XML for the feed. There are a few channel setup tasks, then we loop through the Download code $articles variable to create the feed listings. Let's take a look:

View Template:

Download code
 <rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/">
  <channel>
    <title>The Title of My Awesome Feed</title>
    <link>http://www.example.org/</link>
    <description>The description of my awesome feed.</description>
    <language>en-us</language>
    <pubDate><?php echo date("D, j M Y H:i:s", gmmktime()) . ' GMT';?></pubDate>
    <?php echo $time->nice($time->gmt()) . ' GMT'; ?>
    <docs>http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss</docs>
    <generator>CakePHP</generator>
    <managingEditor>editor@example.com</managingEditor>
    <webMaster>webmaster@example.com</webMaster>
    <?php foreach ($articles as $article): ?>
    <item>
      <title><?php echo $article['title']; ?></title>
      <link>http://www.example.com/articles/view/<?php echo $article['id']; ?></link>
      <description><?php echo $article['intro']; ?></description>
      <?php echo $time->nice($article['published_date']) . ' GMT'; ?>
       <pubDate><?php echo $time->nice($time->gmt($article['published_date'])) . ' GMT'; ?></pubDate>
      <guid>http://www.example.com/articles/view/<?php echo $article['id']; ?></guid>
    </item>
    <?php endforeach; ?>
  </channel>
</rss>

Point your users to /articles/rss and they'll be in RSS heaven - and you haven't even written 40 lines of code.

Now that you have the basic idea, you can modify your rss() action to take parameters that allow your users to select different filtered versions of your feed information, or make other changes specific to your application.

Happy feeding.