XML Hacks

Syndicate Content with Movable Type

Movable Type (MT) is a very flexible personal publishing system that is extremely popular in the weblogging world. One of its most powerful features is its ability to output content into any markup form you may need for easy syndication of content.

While the possible uses for Movable Type’s (http://www.movabletype.org/) template engine are vast, for this hack we’ll focus on the syndication formats that MT supports by default and some of the many things you can do with them. MT ships with templates for RSS 1.0 and 2.0 in addition to the current version of the emerging Atom format, Version 0.3. The RSS templates produce a syndication feed containing the last 15 posts for the weblog including the post title, link, primary category, author, issue date, and an excerpt. (MT has an excerpt field for each post. If that field was not populated it will automatically generate one from the body text. The length depends on the parameter set in the weblog configuration.) The Atom format provides the same information, but it also includes the full content of the post amongst other refined pieces of metadata. Let’s walk through some common extensions and specialized syndication feeds.

Syndicating the Whole Post

Let’s begin by adding the full text of the post to the RSS templates. In order to include both an excerpt and the full text, we need to use the content module so we can use its encoded tag. To do so, we would add this namespace declaration:

xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/" ...