MagpieRSS 0.6 is out. It was a rather long alpha, hopefully that means people tried it, and it worked.

Key features are

  • support for private RSS feeds (via SSL, and HTTP Auth Basic) is working again.
  • refactored the code to support Atom’s “content constructs”, now supports: atom:title, atom:tagline, atom:copyright, atom:info, atom:summary, and atom:content. Thanks to Tim Bishop for feedback and encouragement.

update: – where “refactor” meant introduced bugs. MagpieRSS 0.61 is now out.

Atom

Quick review- Content is normalized. You can access core RSS elements using Atom field names and visa vera.

  • atom:content is stored in $item['atom<em>content']</em> to avoid clashing with RSS modcontent.
  • content constructs are flattened (as if they were always mode="escaped")
  • Everything else is concatted into hierachical namespace.
  • I’ve made no attempt to support base64 encoding

Private RSS (and Atom)

  • To access a feed via SSL use the https:// scheme, e.g. https://example.org/index.rdf
  • To access a feed behind basic HTTP authentication include the username and password in the URL, e.g. http://username:password@example.org/index.rdf
  • And, no surprises here, you can combine them https://username:password@example.org/index.rdf

It would be useful if someone could step up and maintain a list of aggregators that support private RSS feeds, a matrix of support for SSL, HTTP Basic Auth, and HTTP Digest Auth, like Ted has done for GZIP encoding. (Danny started to put together a feature matrix but it looks like that project was stillborn.)