Having created a report that generates a What's New type display as detailed in my previous post, I wanted to create an RSS feed with pretty much the same content, because currently I use about 6 different feeds off the site, and it is a pain monitoring them all. I couldn't find a module that would generate an RSS feed based on a specific query, and whilst it is on the reports module roadmap, it's not there yet.

So, I decided I'd create a module from scratch. New for me, because whilst I've done a significant amount of work on the Events Module, I've never created a new module from scratch. I won't go into my learnings on this one....

Well, I've got the basic query already, all I needed was a way of linking a button with the production of an RSS feed page. In the end a relatively simple set of code, which I won't go into in detail here. This is what I ended up with. Not too much to it is there?

But rather than make this module just run one query, I though I'd set it up so it can be used over again. Consequently I added some settings, which include the feed title, description, what elements to include in the feed (Title, Description and Link are mandatory), and what query to run. You'll notice the query is very similar to the one specified in my What's New report. Well, I updated it a bit to allow me to pass in how many rows from each module I wanted to retrieve, but I guess you can envisage the rest.

Finally, here's the output in IE7's Feed Reader.

If you are interested in the module, give me a shout - webmaster@thedivingclub.co.uk