Automatically sharing new pages with Facebook

Ah. Now that's a thought!

I'll give it a go...

Ta!

I finally got round to doing this and I thought I would share the very basic code I've used.

First I create a simple Perch template:

/perch/templates/events/rss/rss.html

    <item>
        <title><perch:events id="eventDateTime" format="%A %B %d %Y" /> @ <perch:events id="eventDateTime" format="%I:%M%p" /> | <perch:events id="eventTitle" /></title>
        <description><perch:events id="eventDescRaw" encode="false" /></description>
        <link>https://www.gtrbl.org.uk<perch:events id="eventURL" /></link>
        <category><perch:events id="category_names" /></category>
    </item>
<perch:after>        

</perch:after>

I then created a simple RSS PHP script in the root folder:

<?php include('perch/runtime.php'); ?>
<?php
    header("Content-Type: application/rss+xml; charset=ISO-8859-1");
    echo '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1" ?>';
?>
<rss version="2.0">
<channel>
    <title>GTRBL RSS feed</title>
    <link>https://www.gtrbl.org.uk</link>
    <description>This feed contains details of our upcoming events</description>
    <language>en-gb</language>
    <copyright>Copyright (C) <?php echo date("Y"); ?> gtrbl.org.uk</copyright>
<?php 
    $opts_events_rss = array( 
        'filter'=>'eventDateTime',
        'match'=>'gte',
        'value'=>date('Y-m-d H:i:s'), 
        'template'=>'events/rss/rss.html',
        'sort-order'=>'desc'
    );

    $result = perch_events_custom($opts_events_rss, true);

    if (strlen($result) > 0) {
        echo $result;
    } else {
        // No events to show
    }
?>
</channel>
</rss>

That's the RSS feed done. The only thing I need to work out is the pubDate element in the <item /> node. I can't see that there is a built in template field for the date the event was added to the database?

One thing I had forgotten was a <![CDATA[ ]]> instruction around the description:

<description><![CDATA[<perch:events id="eventDescRaw" encode="false" />]]></description>

With that in place it shouldn't bork the feed when there are cr/lf pairs in the field output.

Hi Mike,

Thanks for sharing your code sample. I'll be trying it out for our event calendar.