Feeds

cms.feed.rss() and cms.feed.atom() build a syndication feed from two arguments: the feed’s own details, and a list of items. Everything about which objects go in and how each one looks stays in the template, where |filter, |sortBy and |map already live.

A complete feed

Create a builder page with a route ending in /rss (or .rss), and a template like this:

{{ cms.feed.rss(
  {
    title:       'Total CMS Releases',
    link:        cms.builder.canonicalUrl('changelog'),
    self:        cms.builder.canonicalUrl('changelog-rss'),
    description: 'New capabilities, refinements, and fixes.',
  },
  cms.collection.objects('changelog')|sortBy('date')|reverse|map(e => {
    title:   e.version ~ ' — ' ~ e.title,
    link:    cms.collection.canonicalObjectUrl('changelog', e),
    id:      e.id,
    date:    e.date,
    content: e.changelog|markdown,
  })
) }}

That is the whole template — no layout, no XML boilerplate. Escaping, CDATA, RFC-2822 dates and the atom:link self reference are handled for you.

The route’s extension sets the Content-Type, so /changelog/rss and /changelog/feed.rss both serve application/rss+xml. See Site Builder for how that works.

Feed details

Key	Required	Notes
title	yes
link	yes	The page a reader should visit — not the feed’s own URL
description	yes
self	Atom only	The feed’s own URL. Readers use it to re-fetch
language	no	e.g. en-us
updated	no	Defaults to the newest item’s date
generator	no
copyright	no

self is required for Atom because readers use it to re-subscribe, and there is no safe value to guess — pointing it at link would hand every subscriber a URL for the HTML page instead of the feed.

Item details

Key	Notes
title
link	Made absolute against your domain if relative
id	The item’s identity. Defaults to link
date	ISO string, timestamp, or DateTime
content	HTML. Run Markdown fields through |markdown first
summary	Short form. RSS uses it in place of content if given
author	A name, or {name, email, uri}
media	An enclosure — see below

Items are emitted in the order you supply them, so sort before you map.

Why id matters

A feed reader treats the id as the item’s identity and re-announces anything whose id changes. Prefer something stable and independent of the URL — an object id is ideal:

id: e.id,

Atom is stricter: an entry id must be an IRI, so a short key like v3-5-0 is not legal there. In an Atom feed the item link is used instead, which is what feed generators generally do.

Media and enclosures

media attaches an enclosure — a podcast episode, a video, an image. The short form is a URL:

media: e.audio.link,

The type is guessed from the extension and the length reported as zero. For a podcast, give real values instead — image and file fields already carry mime and size:

media: {
  url:    e.audio.link,
  type:   e.audio.mime,
  length: e.audio.size,
},

Podcast clients use length for progress and buffering, so it is worth supplying. One enclosure per item — RSS 2.0 permits no more.

Atom

Same arguments, different renderer:

{{ cms.feed.atom(meta, items) }}

Serve it from a route ending in .xml, and remember meta.self.

Compared with the built-in feed

Total CMS also serves /feed/rss/{collection} without any template. That endpoint maps fields by name — which field is the title, which is the content — and that is its limit: it cannot build a title out of two fields, and it cannot run content through |markdown, so a Markdown field arrives at the subscriber as raw - **like this**.

Use the endpoint when your collection already has a plain-text summary field and a usable title. Build the feed in Twig when you need control over either.