OPML Feeds using Radiant

Jan 16, 2007 · 2 minute read

As mentioned when I moved the site over to Radiant I promised a few tutorials and behind the scenes footage of goings on. So here goes with a quick look at how I added a nice OPML feed to my site.

For those not familiar with OPML it’s an XML format for outlines, often used for storing blog rolls and the like.

What I wanted was a friends parent and the ability to add friends to it and for them to appear in a dynamic OPML feed. The following screenshot shows what I ended up with:

To accomplish this within Radiant I needed a custom layout, one which would simply render the content but also had the relevant header and footer markup. Note the mime type setting as well.

Next up is the page which actually uses the OPML layout to render the page.

Note that I set the status of all the friends records to hidden, and then set the status of the r:children:each loop to search for hidden children. This way the individual friends records dont show up as seperate pages.

All I need to do then is add children to the parent, friends-feed in my case. I added a few page parts to each friend page to make management a little easier; a link, a feed and for a little added spice xfn.

All in all it makes adding and updating friends easy, and the general approach will work with pretty much any content where you want to compose a single page based on it’s children.