The current RSS Groups feed for BP is a mess.

The current RSS feed repeats the name of the poster, description and title (title last) twice before actually then posting the body of actual post. This makes using the RSS for other purposes (like a widget) almost unusable.

Looking at the BP source code uses the same information for both the xml title and author.

The standard WP rss widget allows for 3 options in all feeds. Author, date and content to be included or not. The date option is working fine, but its clear that the “author posted an update in the group xyzzy :” isn’t the actual xml title of the post.

Also, when posting a link in the group I get the following in the rss feed:

[bpfb_link url=’http://www…. with the rest of the URL.

I imagine this is because I’ve got the Buddypress Activity Plus plugin installed. because of the “bpfp_link” tag the link itself dies within the feed as its not a legitimate html command…

If my assumption is correct that this is a result of the Activity Plus plugin, it sure would be nice if this could get sorted out so that their plugin creates usable rss content!

[Paul GibbsKeymaster @djpaul 1 year, 2 months ago]

I don’t know if the bpfb short code is anything to do with BP Activity Plus or not, but it may be work contacting its authors directly for supporting and letting them know about the problems when viewing it in an RSS Feed. That’s not something we can fix in BuddyPress core (obviously).

Thanks for the feedback about the RSS feeds, I made a ticket: http://buddypress.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/4082

[energynetParticipant @energynet 1 year, 2 months ago]

Thanks Paul.

[energynetParticipant @energynet 1 year, 2 months ago]

I took a look at the ticket… Wouldn’t it be better to move it to the author field rather than just pull it from the description field? That way the WordPress widget option can use the author info if the blog owner wants to or not.

For me, it would be valuable to figure out a way to actually figure out how to scrape a title out of the first line of input and then use the rest in the description field if that was possible.

[energynetParticipant @energynet 1 year, 2 months ago]

There are a number of other moderate issues connected to the RSS feeds.

I’m finding that the RSS feeds are failing to identify posts. for weeks at a time.

Its not clear if this has to do with the WPMU’s Activity Plus plugin , but their posts in some cases only show up in the RSS feed only. This is definitely pretty serious. With these issues, it means that RSS feeds are at best unusable in terms of how they look.