[thelist] Stab in the dark: broken Plone RSS syndication

[John DeStefano]

Barney Carroll wrote:
> Any Plone users here?

Just me <?>  Anyone else?

> I'm only asking because I've found the Plone community to be
> surprisingly disparate and uncommunicative.

Yeah: the only support resources seem to be the plone-users mailing
list, and their IRC channel.  IRC ports are blocked here are work.
The mailing list is quite hit-or-miss in nature: either questions are
answered and discussions sparked (rare), or most questions go
unanswered.  I think it's a shame.

> I was involved in building a
> Plone site (grueling experience if you're a control freak) a while back,
>   and when the client said they needed feeds, I was quite relieved to
> find that Plone auto-generated RSS feeds for its folders.
>
> However the feed for their news folder (the only one) never updated. It
> has a maximum of 15 entries, and once these were filled up with the
> first 15 updates, they just stuck. There've been 3 months of regular
> news postings, but none of these are parsed into the RSS. All the
> settings are right, the syndication is well and truly on and set for
> twice-daily updates. It's an enigma.
>

I'm certainly no expert at Plone's RSS settings; in fact, I seem to
have trouble even getting its "Syndication" toolbar tab to appear
consistently.  But if you navigate to your News folder and click the
Syndication tab (if it's there), you should be able to edit the
existing settings.  For example, you can increase the maximum number
of updates from the default of 15 to any number you choose using the
Maximum Items field.  I would also check the Update Base date and make
sure that it's not set to some date in the future.

If all of that is already set properly, I might suggest
troubleshooting by increasing the update frequency to a very high
level (maybe Update Period = Hourly, and Update Frequency = 60) for
debugging, add a new, test News object, and see what happens.  Be sure
to check your Zope logs for RSS-related events and errors.

> I'd appreciate an email - off-list if you think the issue is OT.

I don't think this is OT (it's web-related, right?) ... but if I'm
wrong, I hope someone will correct me.

~John