• Tuesday, 15 September 2009 13:30
• Written by Dan Knauss

If you are building or running a Joomla site that needs to push the newest content to subscribers and social media -- which most sites should do -- you will have noticed that Joomla is not really strong on XML output. Atom and RSS feed capabilities have really improved in Joomla 1.5, but what you can't do is aggregate--selectively mix and match different streams of content to create different feeds.

To do that just with articles (com_content), you will need the Ninja RSS Syndicator, which is Ninja Forge's first release of the retooled BCA RSS Syndicator. The Ninja team has taken over this indispensible, albeit buggy extension that only came out a year ago. You'd think need would have driven out a solution much earlier--other than the even buggier and moribund, Joomla 1.0-only RD-RSS.

So what if you want to create feeds that combine article content from Joomla with other content from extensions you've added--for comments, events calendars, forums, etc.?

I recommend Yahoo Pipes.

Here is an example of a "pipe" for a Joomla community site that sorts, labels, and aggregates the latest news, comments, forum posts, SOBI2 entries, etc. It also finds the upcoming events in JCal Pro from the current time to 10 days in the future, which is really valuable for providing your users with relevant material. This particular feed is used to automatically send newest/upcoming material to people who want it via Feedburner and Feedblitz email lists, Twitter via Twitterfeed, and Facebook via the Networked Blogs application.

While it is the probably best commercial calendaring application for Joomla, the current stable release of JCal Pro only provides XML output with event titles and links. These go in both the title and description fields in the JCal feed output, a redundnacy you might need to filter out. Critically, JCal Pro uses the actual event start date as the "PubDate" field in the XML output, so it is easy to sort the events chronologically by their occurrence with Pipes. All instances of a recurring event will have their own unique item and PubDate, so pushing regular event notices to people can become a hands-free process if you make use of the JCal feed.

Last I checked, it was not possible to do any of this with EventList, which I regard as the best free Joomla calendaring application, especially with an eye to community and revenue-earning use. EventList has an iCal feed plugin that might be serviceable with Pipes with some finagling, but along with event recurrence handling, feed output is not yet a strong feature in EventList. On the upside, EventList offers mapping, limited RSVP/registration support, plugin support for direction finding, and event venues as a specialized sorting concept so venue managers can maintain their section of the calendar. It's also possible to get comment extensions to work with EventList so people can leave remarks on event and venue pages.

I'm not sure about the other free and commercial calendaring extensions for Joomla, but good XML output is probably a key feature to look into when making a selection. If you want to be able to push upcoming event notices to your users without any manual effort beyond the initial creation of the events, JCal Pro plus Pipes is a good way to go.