I get emails asking about why some news feeds don't render properly in the News Feeds (RSS) module.  The short answer: probably because of some xsl translation issue.  The second part of setting up a news feed for use by the module involves choosing a translation file to render the feed.  This is somewhat difficult for newbies to get their arms around.  Out of the box DNN supports RSS with an xsl file that renders most RSS feeds in a simple way.  However, not all feeds are simple and may require more effort to render properly. Knowing how to examine a new feed source file is important to effectively using those types of feeds.

One such type of rss news feed variation is commonly referred to as an rdf style.  You can do a google search to get details on this implementation, so I won't go into that here.  What I want to share is a simple xsl file that will render most types of rdf document news feeds. The example can be used for most similar types of rdf feeds, but may have to be further tweaked depending on the the namespaces and elements used in the actual feed.

 I've used it most recently for rendering and displaying the RSS feeds from this url, which is a link from Slashdot's home page at the bottom lableled RSS.

http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot

Here's the xsl:

<?xml version='1.0'?>
<xsl:stylesheet
  version="1.0" exclude-result-prefixes="rdf rss l dc admin content xsl"
                xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
                xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
                  xmlns:rss="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/"
                xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
                  xmlns:admin="http://webns.net/mvcb/"
                  xmlns:l="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/link/"
                  xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/">
<!-- phil 'iwonder' guerra - xsl simple rdf translation file. -->
    <xsl:output omit-xml-declaration="yes"/>
    <xsl:template match="/rdf:RDF">
       <xsl:for-each select="rss:item">   
    <xsl:variable name="mylink" select="rss:link"/>
      <xsl:variable name="mytitle" select="rss:title"/>
             <h3 style="color:#cc0000; clear:left;">       
                <a class="headlines">    
      <strong>     
     <a href="{$mylink}" title="{$mytitle}"><xsl:value-of select="rss:title" /></a>
            </strong>     
                </a>  </h3>  
            <font size="-1">
                <xsl:value-of disable-output-escaping="yes" select="rss:description"/></font>
                <br/>
               <span class="date"><font size="-1">
                   Published: <xsl:value-of select="dc:date"/></font>
                </span>       
            <hr/>
        </xsl:for-each>
    </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

There's a host of variations, but hopefully, the example gives you some ideas to further explore rendering similar rdf news feeds.

Cheers,

How would you go about including the top items on the feed for credit and displaying the site image?