Creating Basic Feeds in Django

This is actually pretty straight-forward if you’ve got things set up properly. I had a hard time at first, because I had the “sites” framework enabled but I wasn’t using it the right way. Basically, if you’ve got anything but the default example.com in the django_sites table, the syndication feed framework will be unhappy with you (presumably, unless you’re using the framework the right way).

Here’s what to do:

Put this in the urlpatterns in your base urls.py:

(r'^feeds/(?P<url>.*)/$', 'django.contrib.syndication.views.feed', {'feed_dict': feeds}),

Put this in the top of your base urls.py (replace your_project_name and FeedName with your stuff):

from your_project_name.feeds import FeedName

feeds = {
    'feedurl': FeedName,
}

Create a file called feeds.py and put it in the root of your project folder. This is what goes in it (your_project_name and FeedName are the same as the example above, replace ModelName and date_field with your stuff as well):

from django.contrib.syndication.feeds import Feed
from your_project_name.models import ModelName

class FeedName(Feed):
    title = "Title of the website"
    link = "/whatever/"
    description = "What's the feed about, anyway?"

    def items(self):
        return ModelName.objects.order_by('-date_field')[:5]

You can change the [:5] to whatever number of items you want to show up in the feed, in case that wasn’t apparent.

The last step is to create templates for the feed just like you create for normal page views. Create a folder in your templates folder called feeds. The naming convention goes like this (feedurl is the same as you put in urls.py–like ‘blog’ or ‘latest’, etc.).

templates/feeds/feedurl_title.html
templates/feeds/feedurl_description.html

What goes in feedurl_title.html (at a minimum):

{{ obj.name }}

And feedurl_description.html:

{{ obj.description }}

Replace .title and .description with whatever the fields are called in your model. I usually use ‘name’ instead of ‘title’, for example.

I think it will work without having those templates, but you can customize what shows up in your feed pretty easily using that format. You can even rename what template files to use by putting this in your Feeds class (right below class FeedName(Feed):)

title_template = 'feeds/whatever.html'
description_template = 'feeds/whatever_else.html'

When you’re all done, you’ll be able to view your feeds at:

yoursite.tld/feeds/feedurl/

On a side note–the feed won’t show up in Safari while you’re viewing the feed on localhost for some reason. I’ve heard it works OK when it’s on a live server. Check it out in Firefox or something.

Sources:

• Official documentation
• Fun With Django Feeds
• Digging Into Django’s Syndication Framework