I'm using RSS Graffitty to post RSS items to a facebook page.
The app told me the items were missing the publication date so I added this tag:
echo "<pubdate>".$row['Date']."</pubdate>";
$row['Date'] is obtained from my MySQL database and it's a Datetime column.
How must I format it/echo it so it's recognized by the RSS feed? Must I change the element?
Thanks
RSS 2.0 specifications on the <pubDate>
element should conform to the RFC 822 Date and Time syntax. Namely, to display it in the following format:
Fri, 21 Dec 2012 10:00:01 GMT
If you error run your RSS feed through the W3C Feed Validator you'll note these examples of valid RFC822 date-times:
<pubDate>Wed, 02 Oct 2002 08:00:00 EST</pubDate>
<pubDate>Wed, 02 Oct 2002 13:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
<pubDate>Wed, 02 Oct 2002 15:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
If you wanted to use MySQL formatting, you'd call the column with the following use of date_format()
, adjusting the UTC modifier/marker as necessary:
date_format(Date, '%a, %d %b %Y %H:%i:%s')
Or you can do it via the PHP date method with DATE_RSS
setting the format for you:
echo "<pubdate>".date(DATE_RSS, strtotime($row['Date']))."</pubdate>";
Make sure your <pubDate>
element appear within its parent <item>
node.
Also note that this element is case-sensitive. You must output pubDate
with the capital D and not all lowercase (pubdate
) as other elements can.