Atlas Discussion: How to allow for custom feeds like site-wide and planet feeds

[Allen Gilliland <Al...@Sun.COM>]

This discussion is a subtopic that came out of the conversation about 
the Atlas proposal for the new Roller front page.  This will be for 
talking about the problem of if/how an admin (or user?) could be allowed 
to add custom feeds for use in a weblog.  An example would be a custom 
site-wide feed or planet group feed.

Right now we just allow for weblog feeds and they are controlled and 
standardized within Roller, so anyone wanting to add new feeds has to do 
it as a custom page.

Some thoughts ...

1. there is a finite and controlled set of query params that are 
considered by the FlavorServlet when rendering feeds.  to allow for 
custom feeds means we would probably need to allow for arbitrary query 
params and that makes things more complicated.

2. technically any user can add custom feeds by just adding a page 
template with whatever they want (/<weblog>/page/<myfeed>).  the down 
side is that this is separate from the other standard feeds 
(/<weblog>/feed/<flavor>), but it sounds like we are going to allow 
templates access to all query params for these pages, so they should be 
pretty flexible.

3. users can already override the templates used for their feeds by 
defining certain templates, like _rss (i think?).  this would allow 
someone to redefine how their standard rss feed works, but wouldn't 
allow for using additional query params.


-- Allen