creating an RSS feed from Expression Engine site

[Shawn Campbell]

Hi dev team,

We need to create an RSS feed for our event listings on the CHIRP website, which is built on Expression Engine. I don't know how to do that. Anyone out there who could set that up for us?

Thanks,

--Shawn

Shawn Campbell
General Manager, CHIRP Radio
4045 N. Rockwell Chicago, IL 60618
http://chirpradio.org

Please consider becoming a sustaining member of CHIRP Radio today at http://chirpradio.org/donatenow.   Thanks!

[Dan Phillips]

I'd love to take a shot at this...but I'm not sure I have access to the CHIRP public site, just the appspot / traffic log / etc.  

Am I mistaken?  Is the site on GitHub?

Dan

[Chris Agocs]

Hey Dan,
The site isn't on Github, no. 

The RSS feed is ultimately for the next iteration of our iPhone/Android app, so that they can automatically get the upcoming events. The trick is going to be parsing the information here: http://chirpradio.org/events and making it readable by the phone apps.

I don't know the first thing about how data is stored or feeds are created in Expressionengine, unfortunately. I did find this: https://ellislab.com/expressionengine/user-guide/add-ons/rss/ , but it looks like you'd need the keys to the kingdom to set it up.

The alternative would be to build a screenscraper that lives in AppSpot that provides the event information formatted in JSON.

-Chris

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[Tony Breed]

I have the keys to the kingdom. I spent some time working on this, but I'm having trouble making heads or tails of the expressionengine setup. 

If anyone has experience with it, we could look at it together. 

As noted, it's not on github—and in act we don't even have a staging site. 

Tony 

[Kumar McMillan]

On Fri, Nov 21, 2014 at 10:48 AM, Tony Breed <to...@chirpradio.org> wrote:

I have the keys to the kingdom. I spent some time working on this, but I'm having trouble making heads or tails of the expressionengine setup. 

If anyone has experience with it, we could look at it together. 

As noted, it's not on github—and in act we don't even have a staging site. 

hint, hint, it would grrrreeaaat if we could get the live site on Github :)

I think the way to do it is dump the PHP source code into a private repo and remove sensitive configuration files that have database passwords, etc. Make a copy of those files like `passwords.php-dist` with dummy values and add a note in the README that you have to fill in those values after a deployment.

However, once we do that, we have to be diligent about only deploying all future changes from the Github repo otherwise the two will get out of sync.

In lieu of a staging site each contributor could use a local developer instance. The easiest way to do this is probably to set up Docker (https://www.docker.com/) with PHP and ExpressionEngine. Docker is a way of creating an isolated system of containers, kind of like a VM but way faster. There are lots of search results for 'Docker PHP', nothing really for ExpressionEngine (but their install instructions probably are enough). Here's an example: https://github.com/tutumcloud/tutum-docker-php

I've been using Docker to create complex developer systems and it's super handy. You literally just run a few commands and entire server farms can be built for you. Here's an example of something I worked on: http://marketplace.readthedocs.org/en/latest/topics/backend.html Doing the equivalent of this by hand is cumbersome.

[Shawn Campbell]

We have the RSS feed issue covered, but thanks to everyone for your willingness to help out.

Shawn Campbell
General Manager, CHIRP Radio
4045 N. Rockwell Chicago, IL 60618
http://chirpradio.org

Please consider becoming a sustaining member of CHIRP Radio today at http://chirpradio.org/donatenow.   Thanks!

[Chris Agocs]

What was the resolution?