So because I wanted to get my blog online again with a Plone site I started working on some RSS stuff again.
Basically what I wanted to do is the following: I do not fill in anything in the description field of my blog entries because I directly want to write down my idea and not start with thinking about an abstract. The problem with this is with the existing RSS template that nothing in the body is shown because the description field is used. Thus I thought about replacing this RSS template with a more configurable one and thus using a Five based approch.
So I created some interface for defining an RSS item and I’ve written an adapter for a blog entry to adapt to that interface and use the body field instead of the description field. I did this a while back with Plone2.0 but updated it now to work with Plone2.1 also. Moreover I changed the template to output RSS2.0 instead of the original RSS1. I also discovered that there is a project called fatsyndication in the collective and a basesyndication project basically also defining such an rss entry interface. I need to look a bit closer at them to decide whether I can incorporate changes into them. But my goal is actually more to get RSS2 via adapters into Plone than to create a separate product.
An additional idea is to get enclosures into that feed by simply parsing the description/body field and searching for media links which will be put into the enclosure tag then (feedburner.com is doing it like that I believe). An open question with this approach is yet how to get itunes podcast information into the stream.