RSS 2.0 and More

If you’ve looked at my live Plogger demo gallery lately, you may have noticed a nice shiny new blue RSS box at the bottom right hand corner. That’s right, the latest version of Plogger now supports an advanced aggregate feed generation system via Really Simple Syndication 2.0.

It works like this: At the very top level, where you can see all your collections, the RSS content feed link is a splice of all your individual album feeds interleaved together. Subscribers can also choose their RSS feeds by selecting the RSS feed at the album’s level, which gives the user a spliced feed of all individual albums within a specific collection. If you hadn’t guessed it, you can also subscribe to a single album at a time.

On another note, there have been many reports of the “download selected” feature not working on certain systems, and for good reason. Our download selected function makes use of the Unix /tmp/ directory and attempts to make system calls on tar, a Unix command line archiving program. Most server security setups will not allow this to happen. A lot of system security policies will flat out bar this from happening, thus making plog-download.php spit out a blank screen of sadness.

This is where the wicked fix comes in. I got a hold of the excellent Zend Zipfile class which lets me build compressed files on the fly within main memory. No temp files or system calls required. The directory structure within the zip file perfectly reflects the hierarchy of your gallery and I can stream the output directly to your browser.

For those of you who can’t wait for the next milestone, or are simply interested in testing and tweaking the newest version of Plogger, feel free to checkout the latest version from our SVN repository: http://svn.duffduff.dyndns.org/plogger/trunk.

I highly suggest using TortoiseSVN for this purpose, it makes working with SVN a breeze. If you are using Plogger Beta 1 and would like to be able to use the new RSS features of the latest revision, you will need to run the script _upgrade.php to get your database up to date.

Additionally, feel free to post bugs and feature requests at our public Trac page.