Support custom feed filenames in RSS plugin

[stratself]

Right now, names of RSS feeds are hardcoded in the head meta. This makes the use of custom feeds_filenames incomplete, as the <link> hrefs still points to feed_rss_updated.xml and feed_rss_created.xml even when they're nonexistent.

While I can use some theme overrides to add custom meta tags in head, the old one is still pre-generated by Mkdocs-Material, causing confusing entries for RSS clients. Are there any workarounds to delete these entries? I'll appreciate it lots.

With all that said, would the maintainers be interested in supporting dynamic feed filenames? Should it just be a reference to a config file field, I hope it would not be too hard to do. Thank you

[kamilkrzyskow]

Hi @skedastically,
I believe squidfunk said that he doesn't like adding nested Jinja blocks and currently the theme is on a feature freeze, so no further config updates will be provided.

Are there any workarounds to delete these entries? I'll appreciate it lots.

You could use my guide for dynamic overrides with hooks:

• How to dynamically override templates with hooks? #5060

The latest iteration of the implementation includes 2 hooks, the manager, and the modifier. It isn't described in that guide, but it should be enough to get the idea across and later you'd use your hook to remove this section from the base.html:

mkdocs-material/material/templates/base.html

Lines 30 to 33 in c79364a

	{% if "rss" in config.plugins %}
	<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="{{ lang.t('rss.created') }}" href="{{ 'feed_rss_created.xml' | url }}">
	<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="{{ lang.t('rss.updated') }}" href="{{ 'feed_rss_updated.xml' | url }}">
	{% endif %}

In a more recent post about the mkdocs-nype theme, I mentioned that I've stubbled upon a way to intercept the template load logic and change the values before they're read by Jinja, but I didn't build up upon this idea to generalize it into a hook/plugin.

• Ways to extend the Material theme (Nype SAP) #8223
  Search for "SAP Icons"

---

Another way would be to use a hook with monkey patching and modify the url filter used in the templates <href> | url:
https://github.com/mkdocs/mkdocs/blob/f68e5fc18d3cd3811dbddfdeda1a57721f9e2e4e/mkdocs/utils/templates.py#L37-L40

And you'd check the provided urls and swap out the value from material with your own.

---

A more simpler way would be to just override the whole site_meta block:
https://squidfunk.github.io/mkdocs-material/customization/#overriding-blocks

The code within is rather stable since years, so you could copy everything over to your override except for the rss part:
https://github.com/squidfunk/mkdocs-material/blame/master/src/templates/base.html#L30-L87

[stratself]

Hi, thanks for the guidance again. I followed your hints and from some other places and got to create this hook:

# hooks.py
def on_post_page(output,page,config):
    output = output.replace('feed_rss_created.xml','feed.xml')
    output = output.replace('feed_rss_updated.xml','feed-updated.xml')
    return output

I didn't think it was that easy, but it is.

So I put in some bs4 to specify the elems, and also coded in the filenames gotten from the RSS plugin. The final code becomes:

# hooks.py

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

def on_post_page(output,page,config):

    soup = BeautifulSoup(output)
    # find all rss links with rel="alternate" and type="application/rss_xml"
    rssLinks = soup.find_all('link', attrs={"rel":"alternate","type": "application/rss+xml"})

    for rssLink in rssLinks:
        if 'feed_rss_created.xml' in rssLink['href']:
            newFeedFilename = config.plugins['rss'].config.feeds_filenames.rss_created
            rssLink['href'] = rssLink['href'].replace('feed_rss_created.xml', newFeedFilename)
        elif 'feed_rss_updated.xml' in rssLink['href']:
            newFeedFilename = config.plugins['rss'].config.feeds_filenames.rss_updated
            rssLink['href'] = rssLink['href'].replace('feed_rss_updated.xml', newFeedFilename)

    # newly updated soup         
    output = str(soup)
    return output

I think this is good enough for my small site, although as you've said this would've increased build resource and time significantly. Your approach would've been cooler as well, though I've not wrapped my head around it yet hahah

Once again thanks for your tutorials and responses :)

[kamilkrzyskow]

Nice work on the hook and thanks for sharing 💪
AFAIK you only have 2 RSS links in the <head>, right? Then using BeautifulSoup is overkill for this task, removes more performance that it adds utility.
The first example is better, and could be improved by adding the constraint to replace only 1 occurrence of the link, and we know there is only 1.

# hooks.py
def on_post_page(output, page, config):
    rss_plugin = config.plugins.get("rss")

    # Check if rss plugin is added 
    # Maybe also add if rss_plugin enabled flag is true
    if not rss_plugin:
        return

    feeds_filenames = rss_plugin.config.feeds_filenames

    # Maybe a guard here, I didn't check if config.feeds_filenames 
    # will always exist/contain the proper values
    # 1 at the end limits to 1 replacement
    output = output.replace("feed_rss_created.xml", feeds_filenames.rss_created, 1)
    output = output.replace("feed_rss_updated.xml", feeds_filenames.rss_updated, 1)
    return output