Performancing goes Full Feed!

A week or so back, we had a discussion and poll on what we thought about full or partial feeds. Surprisingly, the poll turned out very close to 50/50 on whether Performancing members publish full or partial feeds.

We’ve wanted this site to be full feed from the start, but the Drupal system doen’t allow for it, and i’ve been meaning to take a peek at the code, and try to hack it for a while. Last night I got a nudge in that direction from Robert Scoble though, and as a result, i’ve just hacked this beast into producing a full feed!

Funny, you could take Robert’s email the wrong way, and get all offended quite easily I think:

Please add full text RSS feeds. Partial feeds suck. Sorry.

But I think using his considerable weight (heh..) to push full feeds is actually quite good, it gave me the prod i needed to go look at the code at least, and now we’re all happy eh Robert?

Hacking Drupal to Produce Full Feeds

For those that want to do likewise with Drupal, here’s what you need to do.

Find /modules/node.module and locate this line:


$items .= format_rss_item($item->title, $link, $item->teaser, $extra);

Change that too:


$items .= format_rss_item($item->title, $link, check_output($item->body), $extra);

and you’re done. Don’t forget to write a hack.log text file though, else when you upgrade, you’ll be back to square one.

Hope everyone enjoys the full feeds!