Tuesday 8 February 2011

RSS Problem

Lets start with a problem:

Here you see a seminar which was created using an Agenda item. As you may notice, a very important piece is missing, namely the start date and time of that seminar. This information is important but missing from the RSS feed. On the website the aggregated feed looks like this:
Using the GX's Media Overview to show the same seminars on one page everything looks ok:
But on the backend one thing is wrong. The agenda items are sorted by publication date according to the settings of the MEDIA OVERVIEW element. The same element produces something else; It lists the agenda items according to its start date in descending order and not as the setting of the MEDIA OVERVIEW suggests by Publication date.
The date of publication is the date of the agenda item's creation! Interesting enough, when looking at the RSS feed, the publication date is contained in the field y:published while the start date/time is missing.

Why is this a problem? First, RSS - Really Simple Syndication makes only sense if the most important information is actually contained in the feed created by the Web Content Management System. What sense does it make to offer people a subscription when it contains the publication date and not the start date of an event? Second, if the UI does not do what it says it does it only confuses people to the point that they don't care anymore about it. Which is a reall problem when the goal of the web project is to make people using it.

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