Support for Drupal 7 is ending on 5 January 2025—it’s time to migrate to Drupal 10! Learn about the many benefits of Drupal 10 and find migration tools in our resource center.Currently the default output for RSS is "Title and Teaser." (This is set at: admin/content/rss-publishing.)
I'm suggesting that the default be set to "Full Text."
My reason is related to the explosion in the use of mobile devices, particularly mobile phones, that are used to browse the Internet. It's pretty difficult reading a typical Drupal site via the small screen of a mobile phone. I'm aware of the .mobi theme; it's awesome. But that is going to be used by a small minority of Drupal sites. Drupal's out-of-the-box RSS is good and powerful. There are a gazillion RSS readers for mobile devices. On a mobile phone, RSS readers are currently the best way to read content generated at a Drupal site.
But the problem is that, in most cases, users are limited to seeing only the teaser because site owners will not have changed the setting to "full text". The "Read More" link will show up in those feeds. However, clicking on it will take you to the mobile device's general web browser and all the usability gains you got using the RSS reader ap will be lost when you are back in the browser.
I think when the decision to make "teaser" the default for RSS output was made, there was concern that site owners didn't want to give too much away via RSS and that site owners always wanted to drive traffic to their web site. I think the world has changed since that original decision was made. Having their site content easily accessible on a mobile device I think would override the concern about giving away too much. And for those concerned about giving away too much, they can change the setting. But out-of-the-box, we should supply the best user experience. RSS with full text is simply a better user experience and should gain the privilege of being the default.
A patch is attached.
Shai
Content2zero
| Comment | File | Size | Author |
|---|---|---|---|
| #8 | rss-output-default-every.patch | 2.2 KB | sreynen |
| #5 | rss-output-default.patch | 666 bytes | Shai |
| rss-default.patch | 639 bytes | Shai | |
Comments
Comment #1
arcaneadam CreditAttribution: arcaneadam commentedI agree I think with the rise of RSS readers and such having the RSS set to display the full text is a better idea then making users have to click "read more" in their readers.
Comment #2
gregglesThis is a change I make on all my sites as well. I'm +1 on it.
Not everybody wants this, but not everybody wants the current default either. Let's go for promoting offline reading/mobile devices/available data.
The patch looks good - it's small anyway. I'm curious what testbot thinks of it.
Comment #4
Shai CreditAttribution: Shai commentedHmmm, presumably this failed because I wrote the patch in June and it just got tested now... I'll re-roll it against the latest dev version of core...
Comment #5
Shai CreditAttribution: Shai commentedOkay... let's try this again, uploading re-rolled patch... and changing to "needs review" to hopefully get that testing bot testing...
Shai
Comment #6
kazar CreditAttribution: kazar commented+1 ... thanks for catching this Shai, it's exactly this sort of thoughtful nuance that will put some polish on Drupal, IMO
Comment #7
sreynen CreditAttribution: sreynen commentedThe feed_item_length variable defaults to 'teaser' in two other places, both of which I believe should be changed along with the line in the current patch. The first is in system.admin.inc, which determines what is shown on the admin config page. It would be misleading to tell admins the current value is teaser when it's actually full text where the feed is created. The second is in aggregator.pages.inc in theme_aggregator_page_rss(). I'm not entirely sure what this does, but I'm assuming it should also be changed. I'm working on a patch to update the default value in all three places.
Comment #8
sreynen CreditAttribution: sreynen commentedThis patch updates the default value in the original line, as well as the two I mentioned in #7.
Comment #10
sreynen CreditAttribution: sreynen commentedNot sure which JS test failed. They all pass on my local install. Trying to retest.
Comment #11
Shai CreditAttribution: Shai commentedHey folks,
This is great: the Acquia blog feed only publishes the teaser. I can't imagine that was a decision the Acquia people thought through. If indeed that was not an intentional decision made by people at Acquia, that example proves that even the power users over at Acquia are vulnerable to bad default choices made in core.
(I submitted a contact message to Acquia suggesting they change the feed to full node. I'll report back the response.)
Thanks to @sreynen for finding those other spots in core. His patch is passing the bot test now. I'll test it on a new 7 install later.
Now that code freeze is over, maybe this can get some attention.
Best,
Shai
Comment #12
moshe weitzman CreditAttribution: moshe weitzman commentedAgree with all the reasons stated earlier.
Comment #13
webchickHm. I'd like to solicit some more opinions on this, preferably backed up by what other major websites are doing.
Taking a few websites I can name off-hand...
CNN and BBC both show only a sentence: http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_topstories.rss http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_world_edition/americas/rss.xml
WordPress.com shows a teaser like we do: http://en.blog.wordpress.com/feed/
Craigslist was the only site I could find that shows the full view, although it is a data mining site, so you could argue this is a feature: http://vancouver.en.craigslist.ca/apa/index.rss
It seems to me that the current default behaviour makes most sense to most website owners; without having people click "read more" people never actually visit your website where you may have revenue-generating ads, etc. And some Drupal users are already freaked out about the fact that Drupal has RSS feeds at all, I think it would be even worse if these RSS feeds defaulted to giving out all of their sites' content.
I agree that offering the full view is a good 'netizen' thing to do, but I don't know that it makes sense as Drupal's default behaviour, as it seems pretty non-standard.
Comment #14
Shai CreditAttribution: Shai commented@webchick, you are wrong regarding Wordpress. Wordpress delivers full content in its feeds. I think you must have witnessed browser behavior (e.g. Firefox and Opera presenting truncated feeds --truncated by Firefox and Opera-- when you click on a feed icon or paste a feed URL into the browser).
Check out WP feeds from a feed client (desktop, mobile, or web-based).
It's about the content, not about the web site. We'll help non-profits and small businesses by modeling a forward-thinking approach to content delivery.
Shai
Comment #15
Shai CreditAttribution: Shai commentedTechnorati recently announced it's changing its algorithms for determining "authority" of a blog to be much more heavily reliant on analyzing a blog via its feed. The following excerpt was published on Sept. 9 and distributed via email today. It is from: http://technorati.com/weblog/2009/09/517.html
We should give blogs hosted on Drupal a leg up on Technorati instead of inhibiting their ability to develop "authority."
Shai
Comment #16
Dries CreditAttribution: Dries commentedI'm a big fan of publishing the full node by default. I'm a power-RSS user following 300+ feeds and it is very annoying that I can't read the entire post in my reader. I think we should lead by example and do what we believe is the right thing to do, but allow people to override the default behavior. Given that there is a UI for it, this is a pretty trivial change to me.
Comment #17
webchickCool, works for me, Dries. :) Thanks for the resource, Shai!
Comment #18
sreynen CreditAttribution: sreynen commentedNews organizations are the exception to the norm when we're talking about open publishing of content. Further, I'd argue that high-profile sites is the wrong place to look when deciding what the default settings should be, as those are the sites least likely to use the defaults without considering their specific needs. As support for this, out of the top 100 blogs listed here:
http://royal.pingdom.com/2009/01/15/the-blog-platforms-of-choice-among-t...
4 use Drupal, and despite the current default settings, all 4 of those have full-content feeds. My point here isn't that we should follow what high-profile sites are doing (full feeds), but rather that they're not using the defaults either way, so we shouldn't worry about them.
Unfortunately I can't find any statistics on full vs. summary feeds in general, but assuming most sites just stick with defaults, full-content seems to be the norm.
Looks like WordPress defaults to full feeds:
http://likemind.co.uk/syndication-for-wordpress-and-drupal/#wordpress
"By default your blog posts will be published in full in your feed."
As does Movable Type, since version 3:
http://www.learningmovabletype.com/a/000458simple_rss_customizations/
"The default RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0 syndication feed templates for MT version 3.x produces a feed with the content in your MT entry body. The default Atom feed template produces a feed with both the entry body and the extended entry. The default RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0 feeds in MT version 2.661 generated feeds with only the entry excerpt."
Comment #19
gregglesThis seemed like a mistaken removal. I think we're all for it at this point. #500038-8: Change Default for RSS Output seems to pass the tests - good to go?
Comment #20
Dries CreditAttribution: Dries commentedCommitted to CVS HEAD. Thanks.