Creating the newsfeeds is pretty straight-foward as long as the feed is correctly formated. You can get any server-side scripting language to generate a feed for you. Below is a code that generates the feed of my articles. Two files will needed - a coldfusion component (get_articles.cfc) dealing with executing a SQL query and create_feed.cfm which obviosuly creates a feed. You may also create a blank articles.xml file that the results will be saved to. I split the code into a few parts, as it's easier to explain how the code works. It's a very simplyfied version however it works quite well and may help to understand the idea.

//get_articles.cfc

<cfcomponent output="false">



  <!---globals--->

  <cfset DSN = "---your datasource name---">



  <cffunction name="get_articles_function" output="no"

   returntype="query">



  // you may specify some additional arguments

    with a addition of if statementsto make this

    component truly reusable



    <cfquery name="get_articles" datasource="#DSN#">

    SELECT articleID, atricle_title, article_content, author, date

    FROM articles

    </cfquery>



  <cfreturn get_articles>



  </cffunction>



</cfcomponent>

Following part will generate a properly formated header of the feed:

//create_feed.cfm



<cfinvoke component="-path to the previosuly created component-"

method="get_articles" returnvariable="articles">



<cfsetting enablecfoutputonly="yes">

<cfsavecontent variable="theXML">



<cfoutput>

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1" ?>



  <rss version="2.0">

  <channel>



  <title>Articles - Blue and Orange</link>

  <description>Blue and Orange - coolest web development blog</description>



  <language>en-gb</language>

  <lastBuildDate>#dateformat(now(), "ddd, dd mmm yyyy")#

  #timeformat(now(), "HH:mm:ss")</lastBuildDate>

</cfoutput>

Article title given in url must not contain any spaces, in this case spaces will be replaced by _.

<cfscript>



  function generate_correct_title(title) {



    title = replace(title, " ","_","ALL");



    return title;

  }



</cfscript>

Cfloop will now produce an <item> object for every record in a database

<cfoutput>

<cfloop query="articles">



<item>

  <title>#article_title#</title>

  <description>#article_content#</description>

  <author>#author#</author>

  <link>http://blue-and-orange.net/display/post/index.cfm/#articleID#:

  #generate_correct_title(article_title)#</link>

</item>



</cfloop>

</channel>

</rss>

</cfoutput>

</cfsavecontent>

<cffile action="write" file="#expandPath(".")#articles.xml" output="#theXML#">



<h1>Feed has been created!!!</h1>

Tagged: RSS  coldfusion