bbPress.org

Hey there, just had an issue with the “favorites” RSS and wanted to share my solution in case anyone else was having the same problem. Maybe it was just a Firefox thing, but the favorites URL (e.g., rss.php?profile=1) was interpreted as “unformatted XML”–there was an error message and the entire markup was displayed. I eventually discovered this was caused by an <a> tag inside the channel’s <link> tag. By changing the “bb_get_profile_link” call to a “get_user_profile_link” call in rss.php I got the URL without the tag, and the feed was interpreted correctly.

Incidentally, I also noticed a couple other things about the script that seemed a bit off–

1) There are a number of calls to “die()” if the feed turns out to be empty–seems like either an empty feed or an error page would be preferable to this silent failure.

2) The “bb_send_304()” call doesn’t take into account that the feed itself may have changed recently, e.g. threads added to a “favorites” list won’t show up until activity on one of the threads causes the feed to be refreshed. (Which is not totally illogical, but it can be confusing for the user to add a favorite, refresh the feed, and still not see the newly-added thread.)

I thought about working up a patch to address these issues, but decided to post this first–maybe the script’s working exactly as intended and I’m just not understanding it correctly.