[Contribution] rss-news feed (V2.1)

[GwilliamP]

Hi All,

 

I am unable to find a support thread for rss-news feed which was updated to V2.1 by bog500 on 20 Apr 2009.

 

I have installed 2.1. I use FireFox and the Google/ig page with an RSS widget to monitor the feed.

 

The latest batch of new products did not show in the feed. It still showed the previous update. I looked at the Google/ie page with Internet Explorer and found the same result. Yes, I did COMPLETELY clear all cache files and cookies.

 

I started digging. Only when I used Internet Explorer to directly open the rss-news.php page did I get anything meaningful. FF just gave me the option to subscribe whereas IE gave me the following error;

This feed contains code errors.

 

Reference to undefined entity 'nbsp'.

Line: 18 Character: 427

 

<description><a href="http://thestoreindevon.com/shop/product_info.php?products_id=1519"><img src="http://thestoreindevon.com/shop/images/Charms/Tibetan/F5-2.CHARMS.TREE.jpg" alt="Tree Charm - Tibetan Silver - 21.5x17.5mm - 1" title="Tree Charm - Tibetan Silver - 21.5x17.5mm - 1" width="50" height="50"></a>Tree Charm Tibetan Silver 21.5 x 17.5mm x 1 Lead & Nickel free Colour  Silver Material  Tibetan Silver Shape  Tree Size  21.5x17.5mm Hole Size  1.5mm ... <br>Item Price: £0.25</description>

So,   in the HTML of the description is the culprit? As far as I can see from the code it is bacause the feed includes the <description> field as below;

	 echo "<item>\n";
	   echo "<title>".$next_product['products_name']."</title>\n";
	   echo "<link>$link</link>\n";
	   echo "<guid>$link</guid>\n";
	   echo "<description><a href=\"$link\"><img src=\"$linkimage\" alt=\"".$next_product['products_name']."\" title=\"".$next_product['products_name']."\" width=\"50\" height=\"50\"></a>" . $pd ."... <br>Item Price: $price</description>\n";
	   echo "</item>\n";

I would have thought that the inclusion of the product description HTML in the <description> field is unnecessary (at least for the Google widget).

 

My thoughts are that the query

$query="select p.products_id, p.products_image, p.products_tax_class_id, p.products_price, p.products_date_added, pd.products_description from " . TABLE_PRODUCTS . " as p, " . TABLE_PRODUCTS_DESCRIPTION . " as pd where pd.language_id='1' and p.products_id=pd.products_id and p.products_status='1' and p.products_image!='$blank_image' order by p.products_date_added desc limit $product_count";

could be modified by removing the pd.products_description element.

 

 

Can anyone suggest the best way of modifying rss-news.php to get round this?