How would the RSS feed be formatted? I suppose one could create a default format with the title and description of the post and link the title. The thing is, different people are likely to want different formats.

Same question for the Amazon XML: What information from the feed should be included in the HTML output?

As for weather, I don't know of any XML weather feeds. If you know of one, let me know, I've been looking for a while. If you just want to display the current weather, take a look at the Yahoo Weather JavaScript feed that I've documented on my site:

http://kalsey.com/rant/archives/i/000436.stm

That's the problem with developing an RSS plugin: the format. MT's new plugin architecture only seems to support single tag plugins. I haven't had time yet to investigate and see if I'm wrong, so if Ben wants to disagree, I'd love to be proven wrong....

To enable something like an RSS parser, I'd need to be able to create a tag enclosure like <MTRSS></MTRSS>, but the plugin architecture doesn't appear to support this yet.

Cool. I've got a stack of tags that I'd like to develop, but are waiting for the ability to create container tags.

Things like: Random Post and the lastn entries for the current entry's category.

And we can do a weather plug in too!  I found a site that offers XML weather feeds generated from government data!

http://weather.boygenius.com/

My main index is rebuilt hundreds of times a day as people add comments, but I understand how a RSS feed for some as a plug in might not be that great.

For everyone, however, a plug in would be ideal for a Amazon feed or related books for a given search term or category.

My problem is I don't know enough Perl to write this!! Help!!

I've finished my RSSFeed plugin.  It creates a loop and has several tags to let you format the data anyway you wish.  It is also cached on your system for x amount of minutes, so that people who rebuild a lot will not be re-fetching from the server to much.  I havent tested it with Amazon yet, but it does work on RSS 0.91.  It should work on RSS 1.0 as well.

Link

The automated rebuild feature would be cool.  Perhaps a command line interface to MT that will let you specify templates to rebuild.

There is a problem is seems with 1.0 RSS feeds.  Try with a 0.91 feed and it will work.  

Make sure you have rssfeed.pl in your plugins directory.

I don't have many of the required Perl modules. How can I add them?

By the way, I have tested some more and RSSFeed does work correctly on RSS 1.0 documents.  So probaly the only major issues are installing the perl modules correctly.

I was trying to use my xml page and put it on here where it says "Last 5".

Someone else pointed out to me that slashdot DOES have and RSS feed at http://slashdot.org/slashdot.rdf.  And that one DOES work in RSSFeed 0.3.

Download XML::RSS here.  Then extract XML-RSS-0.97\blib\lib\XML\RSS.pm into extlib/XML/ so that it looks like this:

extlib/XML/RSS.pm

I dont get it.  If I go in via FTP the file is there fine, but when I try to view it via the web, it's blank.  try this one, this is the rdf file.  If doesnt get parsed either.

Hmmm, didnt work.  I have a call to this in my footer file:


and "nolageek" looks like this:


I also tried with "index.xml"

It seems to me that the new plug in technology in Mt 2.2 will allow someone who knows Perl to write script for new MT tags that could pull in a RSS file. Is this correct? Has someone done it yet?

Also, I'd love to see someone write a plug in that lets you grab an Amazon XML feed for a specific search term or category. That would be incredible!

A weather plug in would also be great!!

I guess what would be nice is to have headlines with hyperlinks in a bullet point format.

For Amazon listings, the same thing would be great.  i.e. Title listings with hyperlinks.

If a basic plug in was developed, at least it would allow others to midfy the format of the listings. My trouble is that I don't know how to program in Perl, but I can modify existing scripts and their output.

No, you're right. I'll fix that.

Awesome! Ben fixed the plugin mechanism to allow for container tags!

http://movabletype.org/docs/mtchanges.html...%20(2002.06.28)

I assume this means we can now write plugins to pull in RSS newsfeeds and Amazon XML feeds?

I just noticed that the Perl script used to create the weather XML feeds is available here:

http://weather.boygenius.com/weather.pl.txt

Yes, you should be able to write plugins that use container tags now. One thing to note, though, is that we still need to figure out a mechanism for running some tags dynamically. For example, an RSS feed reader is not that useful if you need to rebuild your index page every time you want it to update.

We were thinking of writing a general purpose SSI that could build any template (or template module), given the name. You could then include this SSI using exec in your page, and then use the new tags in the template module. Then that section of your page will be built dynamically. Or, I guess, you could use that script I posted the other day in tips & tricks to display your main index dynamically, rather than statically.

I'll look into building an Amazon import.

Hmmm, it's not working for me.  Do I need to do anything to initialize the plugin?  It's just ignoring it.  (I'm running 2.21)

Vincent

Also please make sure the xml file is an RSS feed.  Sites like Slashdot use their own document type so the rss parser can't handle it.  Do you have a url of an xml file?

You install them as per the directions for MovableType (you can use the extlib directory).  I will write up some more complete docs shortly however.  In windows, you can use the ppm program to install them (Just run ppm.exe, then type "install package_name").

That xml page appears to be blank.  Could that be the problem?

I'm glad we can easily install the MT modules like the other MT modules. Could you give me an example? Such as directions for how to install XML:RSS?

Thanks.

In *Nix systems, if you have the permissions, you can say:

perl -MCPAN -e "install XML::RSS"

Did you add version="1.0" to the tag?  When I did, the rss loaded fine.

Sounds like you might not have the required perl modules (look at the docs for the list).  If you have all the modules, you can try removing the cache file.  The cache files are in the form rss.xxxxxxxxxxxxxx.  Its in your DataSource directory.