RSS Feed on a Moodle Forum?

[FN-GM]

Can you make an RSS feed on a Moodle forum? Is it possible? Has anyone done it?

 

Your advice is appreciated.

 

Thanks

 

Z

[beeswax]

I believe you can do this, but I'm not sure how.

[FN-GM]

Cheers,

 

The idea is to set it up so when something is posted in latest news staff will see it in outlook.

 

Z

[secretlife]

in site admin go to modules>activities>forum and then enable rss setting Then in the individual forum settings you'll get the option to turn on rss feed for that activity and how many posts going out to rss.

[danIT]

We've tried it, its a good feature:

 

Couple of things required to 'Turn it on' as always with Moodle is not out of the box.

 

First: Turn on the ability to make Forums RSS enabled

 

Site Administration -> Modules -> Activities -> Forum Settings (Far right hand side)

 

On the Forum Settings page scroll down to find: forum_enablerssfeeds: Set this option to Yes!

 

Click Save Changes.

 

Now when you add a new (or on existing forums) you will see a new section called "RSS" where you can turn on some settings.

 

Either None (Boring)

Discussions - 1 new RSS entry evertime a new discussion is added.

 

Posts - 1 new RSS entry everytime somebody posts a new discussion or reply to an existing discussion.

 

Also a setting for the number of RSS recent articles, the amount of entries that will exist in the rss.xml file at one time.

 

---

 

Second Step:

 

Add a discussion to your new Forum, the RSS feed (or the rss.xml file) will not be created correctly until you have atleast one post in your Forum. The RSS link can be found in the top right hand corner of the Forums main screen.

 

The RSS feed is generated when the CRON job is run, for testing you can force it to run by visiting the following URL: yourmoodle.com/admin/cron.php

 

Note

 

Once the RSS Feed is created with atleast one discussion the xml file is created, it seems that the xml files does not get overwritten each time it is generated only updated with the latest discussion or post.

 

Therefore if you add a post and then delete it and the CRON job has already run in the meantime the RSS feed will include it, obviously it will point to a page that doesnt exist.

 

It may be possible to change the CRON job so that it re-creates the XML each time it is run but i havent loked into it at the moment. My short term solution was to set the cron job to run daily rather than hourly etc, this gives teacher plenty of time to edit post or to correct incorrect posts before they are included in the RSS feed.

 

We are slowly increasing the frequency of the CRON as staff get used to the concept.

 

I've seen schools use this for podcasting over the last few months.

 

Hope that helps!

[beeswax]

The podcasting sounds useful. Do you have any details as to how you go about this?

[danIT]

Basically the school have used it by attaching a video (.mov.flv or .swf) to each of the Forum posts, Each forum post contains a video so when the RSS link is clicked it takes you directly to the video.

 

They also have the media filter enabled for all possible media types so that they don't have to embed any players Moodle handles all that.

 

The course needs to be open to guests so that anyone can access the Forum posts, but as they only use the RSS feeds with the users who have access to Moodle everything is hidden away.

 

Apart from the RSS feed which anyone can see.

[FN-GM]

Hi,

 

I am using this now and it works good apart from one thing.

 

It comes up at the top "by Zak"

 

Does anyone know if it is possible to make that use my full name?

 

Thanks

 

Z