Troubleshooting RSS Feeds in Sitecore

 

Sitecore RSS feeds are relatively straightforward and fairly well documented as Sitecore features go, but what do you do when they don't work as they should?

I jumped in to help on a mostly-developed site and one of the requirements was to migrate several blogs over from the client's old 6.6 instance into 8.x.  We used XBlog to handle the features of the new blog, and migrating content was done via script.

After the blog was up and running, a request came in to syndicate content via RSS.  "Easy," I thought, "Sitecore provides RSS capability out of the box."  I followed the instructions for setting up a new RSS feed, previewed the page, and...nothing.

All I got was a basic blog header that looked something like this:

<rss xmlns:a10="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" version="2.0">
<channel>
<title>Test Feed</title>
<link>http://mysite/en/learn/blogs/test-blog/test-feed</link>
<description>Test Feed Content</description>
<language>en</language>
</channel>
</rss>

I kept getting this error at the top of my feed item in the content editor, even though I had clicked design and set all of the settings:




My auto-migrated items didn't have a FeedRenderer configured.  Every item that is to be included in the feed needs one set.  I recommend you set this on the Shared Layout of your Standard Values item, which in my case was Blog Post > __Standard Values.

Once the FeedRenderer was set up, I started seeing items in my RSS feed, but the only thing I was getting was a link for each item, no title, description, or date.  Again, my rendering parameters for the feed had already been set, and I had the green check mark on the Design button indicating things should have been correctly configured.


Ultimately, to correct the issue, I had to return to the Standard Values template and manually set the Feed Rendering Parameters by clicking on the FeedRenderer in Presentation Details:


Once that was set, I reset the final layout for every language, and the feed was displaying as it should!


For more information on Sitecore RSS feeds and how to configure them:
  • https://doc.sitecore.net/sitecore_experience_platform/content_authoring/managing_items/rss_feeds/walkthrough_setting_up_rss_feeds
  • http://www.sitecore.net/learn/blogs/technical-blogs/john-west-sitecore-blog/posts/2014/11/all-about-rss-feeds-with-the-sitecore-aspnet-cms.aspx



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