I was wondering if this is actually a bug?

If you create an RSS feed in the AdminCP for Blogs, the resulting feed lacks any HTML formatting compared to normal front-end feeds.
This means anyone attempting to import or read the feed gets a solid block of text.
 

That's the purpose of RSS, it's made to just have the plain text content with a link to the original post.

https://invisioncommunity.com/rss/1-invision-community-news.xml

^ Same there

Edited April 4, 20231 yr by Martin A.

Hi,

Appreciate your thoughts. 24 years ago maybe, one could say the same about plain text email; specs and usage change. On the modern web with variations like media rss, a RSS 2.x feed without any HTML formatting is as much use as a handbrake on a canoe. The RSS feeds created on the front end Blogs have HTML, although they lack nodes for featured images.

You mean the basic stuff, like paragraphs, bold/italic, font sizes and images? In that case I agree, as that doesn't rely on the site's CSS. I though you meant formatting that used the CSS from the site.

The gallery and topic feed here do keep those tags, so something wrong must be going on with the Blog feed. Don't have that app myself, so can't check it out for you.

Yes, that’s what I was referring to Martin. 🙂

TBH I’ve posted about this before. We can create feeds from 3 different places in IPS (say a blog RSS feed enabled in a blog’s settings on the front end, a blog RSS feed via Activity Streams and a blog RSS feed from within AdminCP) and they give varying results, leading in turn to varying levels of interoperability depending upon our needs.

Some include images in a container, others don’t, but for my need today (quickly importing demo content into several localdev instances) I wondered if the supplied block of solid text was intended, an oversight or a bug.

This is due to the way the system is built to allow multiple types of content (such as blog entries and forum topics) in one feed while also having high performance / low server impact generating the feed. It uses the search index which automatically strips all formatting (except for paragraphs - those are converted to plaintext line breaks).

So, not really as intended, but a limitation of the way the search index is currently structured with not having the fully formatted version of the content.

Thanks for the rationale on this, that makes sense.