Formatting the RSS Module in DotNetNuke to handle HTML and other formatting tips

I’m currently in the process of moving the Alamo Coders website to DotNetNuke and I’m being introduced to the details of DNN.

By default, the RSS Module isn’t HTML friendly.  However, by adding the following to an xsl tag:

value-of disable-output-escaping=“yes”

Example: Before: <xsl:value-of select=“description”/> After: <xsl:value-of disable-output-escaping=“yes” select=“description”/>

This allows for HTML encoding in your RSS feed.

Another formatting item is to limit the number of items that show in the module:

To show only the first 5 items:

<xsl:if test=“position() < 6”>                 <xsl:value-of select=“title”/>                     <xsl:value-of select=“pubDate”/>         </xsl:if>

Another format to use is:

<xsl:for-each select=“channel/item[position() < 6]">

Hope this helps someone else, like it helped me.

I’m still trying to get the items in the for-each loop to be able to grab it’s channeltitle while in the loop.  channel_title does not work.  Anyone have any ideas?

Reference: Setting up RSS News Feeds XSL Stylesheet, Tutorial Thanks to Eric Hexter of the Austin .NET Users Group for pointing me in the right direction.

Comments

David Dobbins: Since you’re inside the channel/item element while you’re in the for-each, wouldn’t get you ttitle of the item? or alternately, if you are looking for the channeltitle and not the item’s, use: -david

Jason Meridth: That worked…Brain fart on my part. Thanks David. I guess ttitle is not what I wanted. I’m looking for the name of the blog that the item is coming from. I’m still searching to see what element constitutes that information. Example: I want the items to look like: J.D. Meridth : A blog entry about something. right now it does: Los Techies : A blog entry about something.

David Dobbins: You got me on that one. Looking at the XML from feedburner for this page, I’m getting that your channtitle is “J.D. Meridth”. In fact, I don’t see “Los Techies” (with the space) anywhere in the feed. Am I looking at the right feed?

Jason Meridth: You are correct. I grabbed the RSS feed from the aggregate of all the LosTechies blogs. If I grab the feebburner from my blog, the channel name is correct. A friend has a console app that will aggregate multiple blog feeds together and then prepend the items with the correct channtitle. An example is on http://adnug.org Thanks for the feedback David.