FlexWiki Atom Feed

FlexWiki now has the ability to Atom v1.0 feeds. An Atom feed has a number of advantages over the RSS feeds, even v2.0, as the Atom specification was designed from scratch to correct perceived issues with RSS. FlexWiki has had RSS support for a long time now, but the FlexWiki implementation of the RSS support includes a summary of all topics in the namespace for which the RSS is being generated, and it is not configurable. This implementation of the Atom feed allows for the explicit inclusion of individual topics. It is limited in that each of those topics will be included in their entirety.

Required Topic Properties

The properties shown below are required for the correct operation of an Atom feed. Remove the X from the start of the property name (this extra letter is included so that the live example continues to work).

:XCreator: JohnDavidson
:XBlogTopics: AtomFeedGeneration
:XCreateAtomFeedLink: true
:XFeedUUID: f1fd8097-5590-4582-bb99-fcf903da7c98
:XEntryUUID: e0d8d2cd-895c-47df-97a2-6a61573721e3
:XTitle: Atom Feed Generation

The FeedUUID* and the *EntryUUID* values are created by getting a value from the topic GenerateUUID. Ensure the values are regenerated by refreshing the page so that each value copied is unique. BlogTopics must be manually entered: it is not possible to generate this in a dynamic property (yet).

The property *CreateAtomFeedLink* is an optional field. When this is set to true it will cause a link to be included in the regular topic output that says there is an associated Atom feed for this topic. Browsers such as FireFox and Safari will display a notification in the browser address bar, while Internet Explorer 8 will show a feed available in the menu. The manually created link for the atom feed for this topic is:

http://www.flexwiki.com/AtomFeed.aspx/WebLog.AtomFeedGeneration

This sample shows the property *BlogTopics* with a single topic name. It is possible however for the this to be a list with topics separated by a comma.