Here is an updated atomfeed plugin that supports Atom 1.0: download atomfeed.

Changes since the last beta version:

• Moved variable configuration to head sub
• Added simple entity-unescaping in generation of the element
• Adjusted the xml:base attribute to reflect $id_domain rather than $blosxom::url, and added the attribute at feed-level as well as for each entry

This plugin offers basic support for most of the specification, which should be enough for the vast majority of users. Not currently supported are the and elements. has been excluded as it seems an element more aimed at those publishing feeds aggregated from other feeds. probably could be supported, but would have been a bit of a kludge without the use of metadata – so anyone who needs this element could use the meta plugin and a custom template.

Of course, Atom is designed to be flexible and extensible and there are already people out there imagining losts of uses for the format – see this article at IBM Developer Works for some ideas (via Tim Bray). This plugin can never hope to cater for all possible uses, but it should be enough to provide the bare bones that others can build upon to meet their own needs.

The plugin comes with flavour templates and extensive documentation, including a list of all the variables it makes available for use in templates, notes on compatibility issues with other plugins and suchlike. I’ve extracted some of the major points below, but see the plugin itself for more complete notes.

• The plugin has a large number of configurable variables and generates an even larger number of template variables. However, it is designed to be usable with only minimal configuration: set the variables $default_author and $feed_yr, drop the plugin into your $plugins_dir and off you go.
• The plugin is intended to work with nothing but blosxom.cgi and a standard perl installation, but it will perform better if the XML::Parser and LWP modules are installed, and if you are using a plugin like entries_cache that stores the creation times of your posts.
• If you are modifying the content of your entries using other plugins, particularly any that escape characters or add markup (like some of these), you should have them run before the atomfeed plugin. You want atomfeed to get each post in the state that it would be sent to a normal web browser.
• Similarly, if you intend to use the config or prefs plugins to modify any of the variables generated by the plugin, they will need to run before it.
• Podcasters: enclosures are supported. You need to link to your enclosure in the body of your weblog post, and provide the anchor tag with a rel attrubute of “enclosure”. For example: <a rel="enclosure" href="http://example.com/podcasts/august-05.mp3">Podcast for 5th August</a>. If you have the LWP module and you change the $use_full_enclosures configurable variable to “1″, the plugin will also include data on the length and content type of the enclosure (this is recommended as good practice).
• You can include “related” and “via” links using a similar method – just ensure the anchor tags have an appropriate rel attribute for these links to be included in your feed as corresponding s.

Please post any feedback you have to the blosxom mailing list, maybe as a follow-up to this post.

atomfeed released!

It’s finished! See this post for more information, docs and download.

atomfeed-beta-6

Download: atomfeed-beta-6

This is now pretty much ready for release: just a last check for suggestions and bugs. It now supports the whole spec apart from , which seems aimed at aggregators rather than bloggers, and , which could easily be implemented if desired using the meta plugin.

Changes:

• Moved from using class to rel attributes in HTML anchors to identify enclosure/via/related links to include in the feed. Just use the appropriate rel value – there’s no need to include the “atom-” prefix any longer.
• Support for

  . This uses a technique similar to that used by the foreshortened plugin. It is excluded from the default templates in favour of a full-text element. I’ve temporarily placed the


  inside a comment in my feed if you’re interested in how it looks.
• and are now available as user-configurable variables.
• Documentation is now included in the plugin – use perldoc or read directly.
• Includes support for a stylesheet, like in the original 0.3 version. Excluded by default. You can also specify the MIME tpye of the stylesheet.

As before, comments to the mailing list please.

atomfeed-beta-5

Download atomfeed-beta-5

Changes in this version: support for rel attributes in elements, including enclosures (based on Dave Slusher‘s and Keith Irwin‘s enclosures plugin for RSS 2).

• enlcosure: In the body of your post, link to a file you would like to appear in your atom feed as an enclosure. Make sure this link has a class attribute of “atom-enclosure”. For extra points: if you have access to the LWP perl module, set the configurable variable $use_full_enclosures to “1″ and atomfeed will attempt to find the content-type and length of your enclosure. (Test: This little audio file should appear in my post as an enclosure. The code for this link looks like this: This little audio file)
• via: To include a link from your post in your atom feed as , give it a class attribute of “atom-via”
• related: similar to via, simply give a link a class attribute of “atom-related” for it to appear in your atom feed as an appropriate element.

Note: using the class attribute to identify these links may change in future versions.

atomfeed-beta-4

Download atomfeed-beta-4

Changes in this version (also posted to mailing list) based on suggestions from Stu MacKenzie:

• typo corrected
• XML::Parser is now a require rather than a use – those who don’t have this module can now use the plugin with the consequence that their entries will never be labelled as xhtml, only text or html, regardless of validity/well-formedness.
• Regular expression for guessing text vs. mark-up is now: m!! This should hopefully catch pretty much anything that resembles mark-up.
• The check in the start() sub for preloaded templates is now or‘d with the call to _load_templates. I’m not even sure if this check is necessary, as it doesn’t appear possible for any user-defined templates to have been loaded by this stage anyway, unless someone else knows better?

Major Revision: atomfeed-beta-3

Since posting this entry, I have made a number of changes to the plugin. It now contains support for the following additional elements:

• and for

Also, it checks $blog_title, $blog_description and each post’s $title for markup by looking for left-side angle brackets anything matching the regular expression /<[a-zA-Z0-9]+>/. If it finds a match, it assumes that the variable contains markup and parses it as such, labelling it either html or xhtml depending on well-formedness.

You can download the new version here. The link below continues to point to the original version. Documentation is still not finished, but the code is commented. I’m particularly interested in feedback on the _parse_markup subroutine.

Original post

I’ve updated the atomfeed plugin for Blosxom to emit a basic Atom 1.0 feed. It’s in beta; you can download it here. I’m running the plugin, so if you like you can see it in action by checking my Atom feed; the feed’s been checked with feedvalidator.org‘s new Atom 1.0 support. Here are the notes I posted to the blosxom mailing list:

The feed is very basic: only the required elements along with a feed-level pointing at the feed, a based on $blog_description, a element (updated 2005-07-21, but it was always in there), and each has a as well as an element.

I have not yet updated documentation in the plugin. I’m making it available so that anyone interested can take a look and make suggestions before I start looking at adding more support for optional elements and doing some other bugfixes. When I’m happy with it I’ll re-write the docs, remove the BETA flag and post some instructions on my site. Until then, use these notes as guidance if you want to use or test the plugin:

• $feed_yr is now a configurable variable that MUST to be set to the year you want to see in your feed level element. This should be set once and then never changed.
• is derived from the timestamp in %blosxom::files, and (entry level) is derived from a stat()->mtime on the actual file. For these two elements to work as intended, you really should be running entries_cache or similar, otherwise they will be the same.
• entry level ‘s are derived from %blosxom::files. Again, for maximum conformance – to guarantee the tags never change – is currently to use entries_cache or similar.
• I decided not to worry about sniffing for plaintext entries as it seems to me that most blosxom users will have markup in their entries, so the mechanism for determining the type of has remained bascially the same (UPDATED – see below).
• I am still assuming that $blog_title and $blog_description contain only plaintext and no mark-up whatsoever.
• the feed-level element must appear before the s, so I’ve taken the method used in the rss10 plugin to insert it in $blosxom::output in the foot subroutine using a placeholder.

Update 2005-07-21 (1)

I’ve removed the code that conditionally placed some HTML content into a CDATA section. ALL content identfied as HTML will now be escaped.

Feedback

Please direct comments to the blosxom mailing list.