Atom feeds started out as more or less the next generation of RSS syndication feeds. RSS can stand for Really Simple Syndication, Rich Site Summary, or RDF Site Summary, which is part of why Atom’s developers decided to start over with a new name. Syndication feeds make it easy for sites, especially news sites and weblogs, to share their content with other websites and consumers, offering a simpler format for articles than full HTML pages. Atom, especially its REST-based Atom Publishing Protocol (AtomPub), has grown beyond just exchanging lists of articles, but Rails’ built-in helper functions focus on fairly traditional feed applications.
AtomHelper
is mostly used in
Builder templates for creating XML:
atom_feed
Takes a block, creating an atom:feed
element and giving the block
an AtomFeedBuilder object that child components can use for
context. It also accepts parameters for :language
, :root_url
, :url
, and :schema_date
.
entry
Creates an atom:entry
element. Accepts parameters for :published
, which represents the time
when the entry was first published, :update
, which represents the time of
the latest changes, and :url
,
where to find the entry.
updated
Takes a time and converts it to the right format for Atom feed times.