RSS Feeds for Plugin Cafe

The other day I was poking around in the Plugin Cafe forums and I saw somebody request RSS feeds for the forums. Later the same day, I asked a question regarding a little plugin I’m writing to help improve the 3D pipeline over at one of my favorite studios. (Why would I do such a thing? Oh yeah, it’s all part of being versatile)
Anyway, after receiving a very thorough response from the community over there (including Matthias from Maxon), I decided to go ahead and fulfill the RSS Request, as there had yet to be a response on the issue (I’m sure Maxon has their little noses to the grindstone improving openGL support on the mac, etc…)

So without further ado, you can get your Plugin Cafe RSS feeds at:

http://chriskelley.tv/plugincafe/

Keep reading to find out more about how I create the feeds.

Creating RSS where there is none

As you can see, there are two different types of feeds being provided, “Most Recent” and “ThreadFollow”. Basically, these feeds are created by using PHP and cURL to crawl specific pages at Plugin Cafe (PC), extract the data I want to use with regular expressions, and return the results as well-formed RSS.

The “Most Recent” feed is created by crawling the PC Forums Main Page and extracting the “Latest Forum Posts” box in the lower left corner. I pull out the post titles and the corresponding links, and this becomes the content for the feed. Clicking on the link in your feed will take you to the forum page for the post. Pretty basic.

The “ThreadFollow” feed is much cooler. Using the same techniques outlined above, I accept a URL from the user for the thread that they would like to follow. For example, if I wanted to have a feed of the Exporting Scene with Xref thread, I would simply take the URL from that page (a very unruly http://www.plugincafe.com/forum/display_topic_threads.asp?ForumID=4&TopicID=3256&PagePosition=1) and paste that URL into the form provided on the page at chriskelley.tv/plugincafe/. After hitting “Grab URL” I get back a much cleaner URL that gives me a feed following the requested thread - including multi-page threads! (In the PC Forums any thread over 20 posts is broken in to multiple pages).

Basically I extract the TopicID from the original URL and again using cURL and PHP I go to the page at PC and pick out all the attractive bits. ThreadFollow gives back the author (with embedded link direct to post), date posted, and a description (which is a plain-text representation of the entire post).

Hopefully my fellow developers over at PC will find this useful and helpful. I’m not yet at a place with my C4D plugin development that I can be giving others advice, so this is my way of giving back.

And if you find any problems or bugs, please don’t hesitate to let me know - chris *at* chriskelley *dot* tv.

If anyone at Maxon is reading this, I am interested in helping make more official improvements to all things C4D, including UI improvements to the forums, online SDK documentation, and more. Please don’t hesitate to make contact to hear me go on and on (constructively) about how I think we could make C4D even better.

Enjoy!!