Over the weekend I have tried two different rss feed syndicators for my phpbb forums, running into problems with both of them. I successfully managed to set it up using the carp aggregator on the site to display the feed, however it appears there's sometimes problems with the actual rss feed as I am constantly getting a xml error when trying to display the feed. From my limited knowledge on the subject, I think its because xml shits itself when encountering special characters in the feed such as the characters ' and " is that the case? After encountering xml errors when displaying the feed, I headed over to http://feedvalidator.org/ which confirmed this, the feed validates ok but theres problems with the use of special characters in the posts.. So, my question, to prevent the use of special characters when members post in the forum, should this be configured in the admin of phpbb or is this an issue with how the rss syndicator or carp is setup? Any help would be appreciated. thanks
Not sure which characters you are having problems with, or where the problem lies without a little more information. The solution to your problem really lies in where the error is occurring. If Carp is grabbing the feed, but having issues displaying it, you can either use the replace plugin, or use php to replace characters in the output before it displays. There is also an option to strip html from the feed so as not to display live links, etc. in Carp which may be a viable option for you if the characters are in links. If Carp can't parse the feed, then you can't really do anything other than to ask the forum to create a friendly version of the feed for you. If it validates, though, it really should parse. I know there is an option to set the character set that Carp uses as well, not sure if that would be a workable option for you - I think the default changed between the last two versions of Carp and now I'm pretty sure it defaults to UTF-8.