Generating RSS feed in Rails 3

Question

I\'m looking for a best practice/standard pattern for generating feeds in Rails 3. Is http://railscasts.com/episodes/87-generating-rss-feeds still valid?

Answer 1

I did something similar but without creating a new action.

index.atom.builder

atom_feed :language => 'en-US' do |feed|
  feed.title "Articles"
  feed.updated Time.now

  @articles.each do |item|
    next if item.published_at.blank?

    feed.entry( item ) do |entry|
      entry.url article_url(item)
      entry.title item.title
      entry.content item.content, :type => 'html'

      # the strftime is needed to work with Google Reader.
      entry.updated(item.published_at.strftime("%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ")) 
      entry.author item.user.handle
    end
  end
end

You don't need to do anything special in the controller unless you have some special code like i did. For example I'm using the will_paginate gem and for the atom feed I don't want it to paginate so I did this to avoid that.

controller

  def index
    if current_user && current_user.admin?
      @articles = Article.paginate :page => params[:page], :order => 'created_at DESC'
    else
      respond_to do |format|
        format.html { @articles = Article.published.paginate :page => params[:page], :order => 'published_at DESC' }
        format.atom { @articles = Article.published }
      end
    end
  end