The podcasts view ships its RSS feed disabled and carries news wording from the view it was adapted from

Problem/Motivation

Three defects in config/views.view.podcasts.yml, all introduced when the view was adapted from the news view in Varbase News Base. Found by testing the recipe standalone on a Varbase site with Varbase Starter and no site template.

1. The RSS feed is disabled, so it 404s

The rss feed display declares path: podcasts/feed but ships enabled: false. Every other display is enabled. The result is that no route is registered, and /podcasts/feed returns 404.

This matters more here than it would elsewhere: RSS is how podcasts are distributed. Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Overcast all consume a feed. A podcast recipe whose feed is switched off is missing its primary integration.

It is also documented as working, which makes it worse than a missing feature. README.md lists "RSS Feed: podcast content feed" among the view's displays, and CHANGELOG.md lists RSS among the shipped displays.

The setting was inherited: the rss display in Varbase News Base is likewise enabled: false. That may be deliberate there; it is not right here.

2. Four user-visible strings still say "news"

After enabling the feed, the channel description reads "Subscribe to our RSS feed to stay up to date with our latest news posts." The others are the empty text ("There are no news posts yet."), a visually hidden heading ("All news posts") which screen readers announce, and a block description ("Featured news posts").

3. Orphaned Better Exposed Filters settings

A field_news_categories_target_id block remains under the exposed form options, configuring a filter that was removed because the podcast bundle has no such field. Dead configuration rather than an active fault.

Steps to reproduce

1. Apply Varbase Podcasts Base on a Varbase site.
2. Request /podcasts/feed — 404.
3. Enable the rss display and request it again — 200, and the channel description names news posts.

Proposed resolution

Set the rss display to enabled, correct the four strings to podcast wording, and drop the orphaned Better Exposed Filters block.

Already built and verified, on a standalone Varbase site with the recipe applied:

• Before: /podcasts/feed 404.
• After: 200 with 15 items, valid RSS 2.0, channel description reads "our latest podcast episodes".
• The block displays are unaffected: all 12 rows, latest 3, featured 2.
• Zero occurrences of "news" remain in the file; YAML valid; the diff is 5 insertions and 22 deletions in one file.

Before — /podcasts/feed returns 404, because the rss display ships disabled and so registers no route:

After — the same path serves valid RSS 2.0 with 15 items. Note the channel title Podcasts and the corrected description, "our latest podcast episodes", where the shipped file said "news posts":

Remaining tasks

• ✅ File an issue
• ✅ Addition/Change/Update/Fix
• ✅ Testing to ensure no regression
• ❌ Automated unit/functional testing coverage — add a functional test asserting /podcasts/feed returns 200 with at least one item, so a disabled display cannot regress unnoticed. The suite in #3622806 does not cover the feed.
• ❌ Consider raising the same disabled-feed question with Varbase News Base, since the setting came from there and its RSS feed may be 404ing too.
• ➖ Developer Documentation support
• ➖ User Guide Documentation support
• ➖ UX/UI designer responsibilities
• ➖ Accessibility and Readability
• ❌ Reviewed by a human
• ❌ Code review by maintainers
• ❌ Full testing and approval
• ❌ Credit contributors
• ❌ Review with the product owner
• ❌ Update Release Notes
• ❌ Release

User interface changes

• The podcasts RSS feed at /podcasts/feed is served instead of returning 404, and its autodiscovery link appears on the podcasts page.
• Four user-visible strings change from news wording to podcast wording: the empty text, the visually hidden listing heading, the feed channel description and the featured block description.

API changes

• N/A

Data model changes

• N/A

Release notes snippet

• The podcasts RSS feed at /podcasts/feed now ships enabled, so podcast directories can consume it. The view's remaining news wording has been corrected to podcast wording, and an orphaned Better Exposed Filters block for a removed categories filter has been dropped.

AI-Generated: Yes