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Feeds Sitemaps and Data Views

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Feeds, sitemaps and data views

A view doesn't have to be HTML. Name it with another extension and Raster serves it in that format: an RSS feed for your news, a sitemap for search engines, a JSON file for a script, a plain text file. You write these the same way as pages, with the same annotations.

Formats

Extension Served as Values are escaped as
.rss application/rss+xml XML
.atom, .xml application/xml XML
.json application/json JSON string content
.txt text/plain not escaped

The file news.rss is served at /news.rss, sitemap.xml at /sitemap.xml. Links to them written as href="news.rss" are rewritten like page links.

Escaping means a headline such as Fish & Chips "special" can't break your XML or JSON. It happens automatically for printed values in these formats (unlike HTML views, where values are printed as they are).

An RSS feed

The bundled feed model supplies the data:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<rss version="2.0">
  <channel>
    <title>News</title>
    <link><!-- print.feed.site_url /--></link>
    <description>News from our site</description>
    <!-- render.feed.items('news') -->
    <item>
      <title><!-- print.headline -->Headline<!-- /print.headline --></title>
      <link><!-- print.url /--></link>
      <guid><!-- print.url /--></guid>
      <pubDate><!-- print.date_rfc822 /--></pubDate>
      <description><!-- print.summary -->Summary<!-- /print.summary --></description>
    </item>
    <!-- /render.feed.items('news') -->
  </channel>
</rss>

render.feed.items('news') returns the newest published items of the news collection (no drafts, nothing scheduled for later), with every field of the item plus:

Key Value
url the item's full address
date_rfc822 its date in the format RSS wants (Mon, 28 Sep 2026 10:00:00 +0000)
date_iso its date in ISO 8601, for Atom and JSON Feed

The date is the item's publish date, or its last update. The number of items is 20, or config::set('feed_limit')->to(10), or a second argument: feed.items('news', 5).

print.feed.site_url is the site's home address.

Tell browsers and feed readers about the feed in your <head>:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="News" href="news.rss">

A sitemap

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  <!-- render.feed.pages -->
  <url><loc><!-- print.url /--></loc><lastmod><!-- print.updated /--></lastmod></url>
  <!-- /render.feed.pages -->
</urlset>

render.feed.pages lists every page of the theme and every published item of every collection that has an item view (<name>_item.html), each with url and updated (a date).

Left out automatically: partials and emails (_…), protected pages, and the account and newsletter pages. Change that list with:

config::set('sitemap_skip')->to(array('login', 'account', 'register', 'forgot', 'reset', 'thanks', '404'));

JSON

In a .json view, the rows of a render block are separated by commas, so a block placed inside [ … ] makes a valid JSON list:

{
  "title": "Our journal",
  "items": [
    <!-- render.feed.items('journal') -->
    {"url": "<!-- print.url /-->", "title": "<!-- print.title -->Title<!-- /print.title -->", "date": "<!-- print.date_iso /-->"}
    <!-- /render.feed.items('journal') -->
  ]
}

Printed values are escaped as the inside of a JSON string, so always put them between quotes. This is how the demo café builds a JSON Feed.

If you just need a model's data as JSON, you may not need a view at all: a model can offer its methods at /api/<model>/<method> by listing them in api(); see Models.

Plain text

In a .txt view each rendered row becomes one line:

Opening hours
<!-- render.cafe.hours -->
<!-- print.day -->Day<!-- /print.day -->: <!-- print.time -->time<!-- /print.time -->
<!-- /render.cafe.hours -->

Useful for robots.txt-style files, humans.txt, or simple machine-readable lists.

Your own data

Any model works in these views, not just feed. A method that returns rows can fill a feed of products, events or anything else. Remember that in feeds and JSON your values are escaped for you, so return plain text rather than HTML-escaped text.

Raster PHP · Repository · AGENTS.md (full specification) · Changelog · Demo café

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