Still having RSS issues?

Posted: Mon Apr 24, 2006 2:40 pm

I love the overall package so much and we have been getting so many compliments from our members since switching, there is no way am I gonna whine over what is a relatively minor thing (to us).
Just wondering if this was an ongoing overall Nuke issue or if was just me? Bang Head

I applied everything I could find about getting the RSS to function properly, from here and several other forums, both to my previous version and this one and still no go. They worked for about a week under 6.0, but never have gotten them to work since then.
I think I read a post (here?) about the Nuke RSS having problems from the start, but I may be getting confused since been reading up on so many things.
Anyway, everything else is working great so this is just curiosity.

Posted: Mon Apr 24, 2006 2:50 pm

What is the problem with RSS exactly? Seems to be working on my test sites

Posted: Mon Apr 24, 2006 3:22 pm

The Nuke RSS is very sensitive to the quality of the feeds coming in. If they don't conform to the standard and do something like stick a stray single quote in the wrong place it can create a SQL error and all you will see is a message "you have a problem with your block file" (or some variant, I forget the exact wording). You might try it with some of the standard feeds that are in the block setup and see if it works with them.

And like Evaders says, let us know more specifically what's wrong and probably post the feed that you are trying to get to work and someone else can try that too. My bet is a stray single quote, I got that a lot when I tried the Velonews feed.

Posted: Mon Apr 24, 2006 3:36 pm

Still getting the old "problem with the RSS file URL" message whenever we try to add a feed.
I'm clueless since I did everything suggested to fix. Nothing else is causing us problems. This is not integral to our sites, just be nice to have.
I am happy just to have a system that works as wonderfully as this one does.

Posted: Mon Apr 24, 2006 4:09 pm

Try this. Go into administration, blocks, add a new block (as I know you have). Give it a title, anything will do. Go over to the box that says custom and pick Ravenphpscripts from the drop down. Position it where you want, center down works for me. Leave the rest of the stuff blank.

You should get the feed from Raven's site. If not tell us what the message is. If it works then give us the exact URL of the feed that you are trying to work that fails.

Posted: Mon Apr 24, 2006 5:02 pm

Didn't mean to turn this into a support issue..others have much more pressing problems than my wife getting her news.
Can a feed problem be related to a database problem?
Our host's MySQL server has been giving us fits the last 2 days and I just received an email saying the found their problem and have corrected it.
Now the feeds work.
I had previously tried using Raven's feed as I knew that would be good and kept getting the URL error.
Once again, my mind is boggled as we have been having the same problem since the first 6.0 install by our host.
But my wife will be happy now, which means another beer for me.
The site that has been giving all the problems is here.(Shameless plug)
It's my wife's project and she is ecstatic over the new look. Cheers

Some day I hope to be able to contibute something positive here instead of always asking questions.

Posted: Tue Apr 25, 2006 6:10 am

wolfear, without questions we have no answers, so keep them coming...

killing me

Posted: Tue Apr 25, 2006 11:45 pm

wolfear - you are getting free beers in excchange for working news feeds ( LOL ) ?
If that is the case, you might want to check this out (Multiheadlines V2.0 ) [ Only registered users can see links on this board! Get registered or login! ]

Posted: Wed Apr 26, 2006 12:28 am

Purely for information purposes and is not in anyway related to Ravenuke;
Where some wysiwyg editors can be utilised for creating blocks by manually entering the required code via the block admin area they sometimes use a check_html function which might convert any '&' in the feed url to '&amp' which would break the url to the feed.

If you are sure your block code is correct and the feed url is correct then it might be advantageous to check how the url is posted in the database directly to ensure the url is actually valid.

Posted: Wed Apr 26, 2006 6:29 am

Thanks for that link to aikons.net Guardian. For what it's worth, I think people might be much better off with an add-on reader like that than relying on the built in Nuke reader that's activated from blocks management. I've tried the Nuke reader and it doesn't work worth s*** (oh there I go again) what I mean is that it fails generating a SQL error that you will never see if the feed is at all in error and thus it's a pain to administer. And the code for it is scattered all over the core of nuke, duplicated in blocks.php and mainfile.php for instance and very unreliable. So anyway thanks for the link.

Posted: Wed Apr 26, 2006 7:11 am

Thanks for the link Guardian. Just downloaded it and I'll give it a try.

I shy away from most wysiwyg editors. I have been using Arachnophilia for about 4 years.

btw Guardian- beer for feeds is the barter system at its best.
ROTFL

Posted: Wed Apr 26, 2006 8:29 am

fkelly - as far as I know, the 'core' code dealing with RSS has hardly been touched for quite some considerable time so I guess there is some possibility that some of the more up to date feed types are not handled correctly.

I suppose it could be fixed but to be onest I don't see the point when there are third party add-ons that can handle it much better, offer you a raft of options and functionality that nuke doesn't etc etc.
It would certainly be nice to drag nuke kicking and screaming into modern day RSS/XML file handling with some useful functions..........

wolfear - Yup, I also use some cobbled together stuff that is based on a Magpie reader, that works quite well if you just need a small number of feeds setting up on a page.

Posted: Wed Apr 26, 2006 9:04 am

Guardian: it's really not a matter of the Nuke code not handling up to date feeds as it is that it doesn't handle "exceptions" gracefully. One of my bike sites (Velonews) for instance occasionally fails to escape single quotes in it's feeds and causes and SQL error which in turn causes that "there's a problem with your block file" error message. Nonetheless we are in agreement about the best path. I suppose the best long term path would be to tear that code entirely out of Nuke and substitute in a dedicated RSS module. But that would require altering the blocks table and mainfile and blocks.php and probably some other places and there are probably higher priorities for RN 2.1 etc.

People with standard feeds can probably use the existing capabilities without a lot of problems anyway.

Posted: Wed Apr 26, 2006 10:39 am

Aye, single quotes aren't properly managed in phpNuke at all, too much relies on magic_quotes. Working on system-wide changes for that with Raven, will result in some kind of standard filter

If there's anything you can suggest to standardize RSS feeds, that would be great

Posted: Wed Apr 26, 2006 2:25 pm

The problem is that there is a standard for RSS feeds (several levels of them actually) but you are relying on a gadzillion different sites to implement them accurately. At one point I had modified the SQL update statement that's towards the bottom of the headlines function of mainfile so that the SQL error message and accompanying SQL would be displayed if the update failed. There is similar code in the blocks.php program in the /admin directory and I don't recall if I had modified that. Even that modification is not really sufficient because having a user see the error message, which can happen if it happens when mainfile is run (the entry in the blocks table is refreshed periodically from the external source) really doesn't help much. What you'd really need is (a) better parsing and (b) some kind of rss_error table where the offending sql could be logged and the admin could review it and get after the source of the rss feed to clean up their act or else prohibit their use.