A WordPress build i am working on wants to pull in stories from rss feeds, and then allow users of the site to add comments and star ratings to each one. It doesn't really seem like the correct useage of rss to me, but is this sort of thing possible without importing/syncing the rss feeds with the database?
A:
Presumably you don't want stories users have voted on to disappear when they fall out of the RSS feed, so you're going to have to store a copy of said story in your database.
So the short answer to your question is "No."
Additionally, I don't see any reason this isn't a "correct useage of rss".
Frank Farmer
2010-01-08 00:35:41
+1
A:
At the very least you need some way of associating ratings with a particular story. This means storing some unique 'story' identifier so you can retrieve it later and calculate its ratings and comments. You could get away with not syncing the entire feed if you could come up with a reliable means of identifying and associating the unique_id I mentioned.
Example:
#dbo.stories_comments
--------------------
|story_id | comment|
--------------------
| 12345 | Lorem..|
| abcde | Ipsum..|
--------------------
Like I said, the tricky part is coming up with the story_id
Mike B
2010-01-08 00:36:31
and RSS specs has definitely made life easier by making that `<guid>` optional
Anurag
2010-01-08 00:42:01
That was my first instinct as well -- simply store `<guid>`. However, that has the side effect of making all votes on <item>s that age out of the feed meaningless. Once you can no longer fetch the details from the feed, all you're left with is votes and guids.
Frank Farmer
2010-01-08 01:24:19