Wednesday, 4 April 2007

Article: Syndicate Content With Zend_Feed Classes

Alexander Netkachev explains the basics of content syndications and demonstrates how to use Zend Framework Zend_Feed classes for consuming news feed of your site. He says, content syndication is a method that keeps your readers updated with site news, new releases, blog posts, and other information channels.

He explains the article under the following sections:

Content Syndication Formats Are Machine-readable XML Formats

He says if you add another view of your site content performs syndication. The format of this view should be one of the formats other programs can read and process.

Channel and Entities Within Is the Main Concept

The most typical feed that you may find in modern systems like Wordpress or blogger.com is made up of one channel and entities that belong to this channel, for example blog and its posts or post and its comments. But some formats, RSS for example, support multiple channels per feed and he demonstrates this with an example.

Syndication, RDF, RSS, Atom, Feed Are Just Different Names of the One Thing

He points out that when a new technology is growing up, this process is powered by collaborative effort of many people and a lot of them have their own view on how to achieve the result. There are only few ‘best practices’ and in case of content syndication there are very few formats that are really used by RSS and Atom.

Atom Format Details

He reminds you that the atom format is based on the XML document format, which means that an atom document is a text document that is human-readable and is made up of tags and some of the tags may have content.

Zend Framework classes for consuming feeds are in Zend_Feed namespace

He tells you that Zend Framework classes that help the developer create a feed are in Zend_Feed namespace. The ‘namespace’ means that their names begin with Zend_Feed and they are located in the ‘Zend/Feed’ folder. He gives a diagram to show how the Zend_Feed base classes and Atom feed classes are derived from them.

How to create Atom feed with Zend Framework

He gives three steps that the site developer can use to create a feed.