About: rss.pl is meant to provide an extensible tool for creating RSS 0.91 formatted files suitable for syndication. The script relies on two external files for configuration information. Rather than trying to explain how this occurs, I'll show you using the provided lastAcquired files. There are currently three rss feeds bundled in this tarball (lastAcquired, longestUnseen, and mostReserved), the config files for each of these should be modified to suit your local site. A smallish Koha image (sm-koha-icon.jpg) is included as well. Dependencies: rss.pl depends on an installed Koha system, and uses the C4::Context module it provides. Details: rss.pl is meant to be run from cron (probably once a day or so -- more often at larger libraries depending on the report being generated). It is invoked like this (in the case of lastAcquired): rss.pl /path/to/rssKoha/lastAcquired.conf The basic process is that rss reads the config file (lastAcquired.conf) to determine RSS header information, the SQL query used to generate the results, and the HTML::Template style used to format the output. Since you'll likely to want to create your own RSS content, or at least modify the ones present here, let's review the config file and the template file. A config file is divided into three sections; channel, image, and config. A section begins with the name of the section occuring alone on a line, and ends with the beginning of the next section (or the end of the file). Each of these sections contains series of configuration options in the form: name=content The content section can contain spaces, but not newlines, special characters, or html mark-up. It's also important that there are no blank lines within the config file. Here's the lastAquired.conf by way of example: channel title=Recent Koha Acquisitions link=http://www.koha.org desc=The 15 most recent acquisitions lang=en lastBuild=Fri, 09 May 2003 08:00:00 image title=Koha, the worlds best Open Source Library System url=http://www.koha.org/images/foo.jpg link=http://www.koha.org config tmpl=lastAcquired.tmpl output=lastAcquired.xml query=select biblioitems.isbn as isbn, biblio.title as title, biblio.author as author from biblio, biblioitems, items where biblioitems.biblionumber = items.biblionumber and biblio.biblionumber = items.biblionumber and items.dateaccessioned is not NULL order by items.dateaccessioned desc This data (and the data acquired from the query) are then used to fill in the template. Most of the template is boilerplate and should not be edited. The section within the <TMPL_LOOP NAME=ITEMS> ... </TMPL_LOOP> is the part which can be modified to create your own RSS content. Here's the lastAcquired.tmpl file: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <!DOCTYPE rss PUBLIC "-//Netscape Communications/DTD RSS 0.91/EN" "http://my.netscape.com/publish/formats/rss-0.91.dtd"> <rss version="0.91"> <channel> <title><TMPL_VAR CHANNELTITLE></title> <link><TMPL_VAR CHANNELLINK></link> <description><TMPL_VAR CHANNELDESC></description> <language><TMPL_VAR CHANNELLANG></language> <lastBuildDate><TMPL_VAR CHANNELLASTBUILD></lastBuildDate> <image> <title><TMPL_VAR IMAGETITLE></title> <url><TMPL_VAR IMAGEURL></url> <link><TMPL_VAR IMAGELINK></link> </image> <TMPL_LOOP NAME=ITEMS> <item> <title><TMPL_VAR TITLE>, by <TMPL_VAR AUTHOR></title> <link>http://opac.library.org.nz/cgi-bin/koha/opac-searchresults.pl?isbn=<TMPL_VAR ISBN></link> </item> </TMPL_LOOP> </channel> </rss> Credits: Originally written by Pat Eyler (pate@eylerfamily.org), suggestions, advice, and help came from 'Content Syndication with RSS', Chris Cormack, Mike Hansen, Steve Tonnesen and a variety of folks on #koha at irc.katipo.co.nz.