Django Syndication with Colddirt II

Published on Sunday, June 3, 2007

Since I've already covered a really simple syndication example, I'll move onto something a little more complex. Let's say you want to offer syndication that is slightly more custom. The Django syndication docs give an example from Adrian's syndication of beats. I had to ponder a minute to get "custom" syndication to work, so here's my example from start to finish.
First, as usual,

class PerDirt(Feed):

    link = "/"
    copyright = 'Copyright (c) 2007, Blog Mozaic'
    def get_object(self, bits):
        from django.shortcuts import get_object_or_404
        if len(bits) != 1:
            raise ObjectDoesNotExist
        my_dirt = get_object_or_404(Dirt, slug__exact=bits[0])
        return my_dirt

    def title(self, obj):
        return obj.slug
    def description(self, obj):
        return obj.description
    def items(self, obj):
        from django.contrib.comments.models import FreeComment
        return FreeComment.objects.filter('-submit_date')

You can see that this differs slightly from the simpler syndication example. I'll not a few things. But first, I need to show

feeds = {
    'mydirt': PerDirt,

urlpatterns = patterns('',

Let's pretend the dirt word (or if you were doing a blog, you could do this based on slug) is "nifty". So, the process is like this: a request comes in as /feeds/mydirt/nifty/ -- it is first looked up in the feed_dict (because of the mydirt part) and then sent to PerDict. Once in PerDict it hits the first def, get_object. One of the things that confused me at first is what the 'bits' part is. Simply put: it is the crap after you tell Django which feed to use. Similar to the beats example, I'm testing to make sure the length is only one -- so if the word doesn't exist or somebody just types in feeds/mydirt/nifty/yeehaaa/ -- they will get an error. Next the object is looked up, in this case the dirt word (in your case, maybe a blog entry).
The title and description are self-explanatory. The items are a query from the FreeComment database, ordered by date. What we need next is the correct templates.


Comment by {{ obj.person_name }}

Once again, the filename is important (mydirt_title). obj.person_name is the name from the comment.


{{ obj.comment }}
Posted by: {{ obj.person_name }}
Published: {{ obj.submit_date }}

If you are curious how to get that little orange icon next to your site's url, you do this:

That's it. Hopefully I've explained how to create somewhat custom syndication feeds, in case you needed another example.