Extension talk:SimpleRSS.php
We want a more solid solution for the wiki RSS reading and rendering than the current MW:Extension:RSS Reader, including the following main concerns:
- No dependency installation
- Aggregation by specifying a list of urls
- More control over what fields are displayed and their layout (with a template?)
- Optional Ajax so page load isn't held up and can update on change without page reloads
- Control over file caching time and ajax update time
To check out before doing any dev
Development
Rob has had experience with developing RSS related code before so he'll handle the main functionality and structure of the extension. Nad will handle the XML/DOM and Ajax aspects.
RSS parsing
The current extension uses an external dependency, lastRSS.php to read the RSS with simple file-based cache/expiry system using MD5(url) for filename. It may be doing some things we need to replicate ourselves, but most of the code is concerned with regular expressions for handling the XML, and that aspect can be handled much more compactly by reading the RSS as a DOM object instead.
Ajax
The ajax should be able to poll for headers only and then when changed it should post a request to MediaWiki which includes the changed feed and the timestamp of the last update. MediaWiki should then use an AjaxDispatcher to respond with the new item[s] which the ajax can then prepend to the innerHTML of the target area.
