Does RSS feed get regen’d when posts are UPDATED?

There’s no “regenerating” of the RSS feed. All the feeds are built on demand. It’s not like there’s a file on the server with the feed in it, the feed is just another way of looking at the data in the database. So the feed is always up-to-date.

If you’re not seeing updates in your feed, then you’re not actually looking at your real feed. You’re looking at a cache of your feed somewhere. Maybe your feedreader is caching it, maybe you’re running the feed through some other system like feedburner, who knows?

But WordPress always has the latest information in the real feed, because it’s generating the feed at the time you ask for it.

Good answer Otto.

Here are other things I’ve noticed.

In Google Reader, at least,
the feed is cached, and even if I delete a post, the post remains displayed in the reader’s view of the feed.

I don’t know if that’s the case for someone who subscribes after the post was deleted.

If I change the
[feed-post-meta-data] – in my case via the plugin ‘BetterFeed’ – the post is updated, so I guess part of my feed is not cached but is [hotlinked] within Google Reader, so it is generated on the fly.

I’ve only tried Google Reader, and I love it in 100 ways, but it would be good if once in a while it did a re-cache. Maybe it does, and my random sampling happened to show up old posts (deleted a week earlier), which it has since deleted.

I suppose I ought to submit these questions to Google Reader.

(Interesting stuff about how WP builds the feed each time it is requested, good to know, thanks Otto.)

So if I’m understanding correctly, it’s up to the feed reader to “notice” that a post has been updated and indicate that in its UI.

When I look at the XML code for my feed, it is showing my updated post text and time-stamp. So WordPress is behaving as intended.

I’m using an RSS reader app called SharpReader, and I don’t know if it’s caching the old request, or just doesn’t think the updated post should be shown as new, I’ll play with it and see where I get.

The key is that the problem isn’t with WordPress. Thanks everyone!

Hi davet654,

Also remember that you can adjust the settings of the various desktop readers. By default SharpReader checks for updates once a hour I believe – this can be changed.