Help with RSS feed generation

[eluser]Daniel Peraza[/eluser]
Hi guys!. Although I have been using RSS feed aggregators for a while, I am rather new in generating RSS feeds with PHP/MySQL. I have found some useful information in this forum that could help me to use a template in order to build a RSS view of my content and sent it over the Internet, but I have some doubts about feed publishing and subscription because I have read that a XML-RRPC server implementation is needed in order to alert subscribers that content has changed. I have not worked with XML-RPC ever before, but I have no problem in doing so.

Since the system I am working on needs to keep the content of several sites updated and in sync with a main site and offering to visitors the possibility of subscribing to the RSS channel, I would like to know if the simple fact of generating the XML code for the RSS feed will do this job for me, or if a XML-RPC server is really needed.

Furthermore, I need to ship several images along with every news item. I would like to find a way to do this without mixing image data with content data.

Is there any PHP class that could do all this work for me?, All I have found so far are RSS parsers as SimplePie and Magpie RSS.

At last, and just as a comment, I took a look to the template used in http://www.derekallard.com/blog/post/bui...de-igniter, and the fact that the news item content was encoding into a <description> instead of a <content> tag attracted my attention. According to Ben Hammersley's Content Syndication with RSS from O'Reilly, this should be an error, although is a common practice among RSS 0.9x users.

[eluser]pistolPete[/eluser]
[quote author="Daniel Peraza" date="1240028434"] I would like to know if the simple fact of generating the XML code for the RSS feed will do this job for me, or if a XML-RPC server is really needed.[/quote]

RSS feeds are based on polling:
wikipedia:

The RSS reader checks the user's subscribed feeds regularly for new work, downloads any updates that it finds,

On the other hand, XML-RPC is something completely different, the only thing in common is the usage of XML.
wikipedia:

XML-RPC is a remote procedure call protocol which uses XML to encode its calls and HTTP as a transport mechanism.

So there is no need to implement an XML-RPC server in your case.

[quote author="Daniel Peraza" date="1240028434"]Furthermore, I need to ship several images along with every news item. I would like to find a way to do this without mixing image data with content data.[/quote]

You could use the enclosure or the media tag:
http://blog.forret.com/2005/06/rss-with-...odcasting/
http://search.yahoo.com/mrss

[eluser]Daniel Peraza[/eluser]
Ok thanks, I just got confused with chapter 12 of the aforementioned O'Reilly's book, "Publish and Subscribe" which talks about a XML-RPC server. My confusion specifically starts around the <cloud> element of RSS specification, which to my understand, is meant for that purpose.

I'm running out of time and I'm just trying to gather the documentation I need to finish the work, so I didn't have the time enough to reading the book carefully.

[eluser]Daniel Peraza[/eluser]
I took a close look and I realized that RSS Syndication systems may work in two ways: pull based (the user must request the feed) or using Publish and Subscribe. The latter one allows instant propagation of new content among the feed subscribers, but a XML-RPC server or some other thing similar is needed in order to inform to subscribers that new feed content is available.

Thanks for your help!.