RSS Feed update?

Hi Brook. It’s difficult to talk about this if we’re not using the same tests. I’m just trying to figure out what’s going on and from my tests, both the default RSS widget that ships with WordPress as well as Feedly both sort the same and in so doing point to the problem being with the plugin feed, not the reader.

I understand that. ?? Unfortunately though I am not a feedly expert. My expertise ends once we leave The Events Calendar’s feed, and start processing it elsewhere. If there is a problem with the ordering as it appears within the raw feed, I can help diagnose that. But, there appears to only be a problem within Feedly’s processed version of the feed. When I view the raw feed it’s sort order is expected. Thus it would seem feedly is reordering it for some reason. Perhaps there is a setting or something they have? Regardless, it is likely that feedly can be of more assistance here and help you explain why the sort order is not necessarily that of the raw feed.

– Brook

Hi Brook. Here’s the problem: It’s not just Feedly, it’s also the default WordPress RSS widget that sorts this way. There’s something wrong with the feed, because none of the other feeds do this, just Tribe. I could understand it if it was limited to Feedly, but it’s not. Check for yourself and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

Thanks!

Any more info on this?

Hello again! I forgot to mention to you last week that I tried to reproduce your problem with the WordPress RSS Widget.

The RSS widget sorts feeds based on the <pubDate> field in reverse chronological order. So an item in February will appear above an item in January. That’s how the widget is designed, and it behaves exactly as expected with out feed. There is no improper ordering. Although the order that widget choose does happen to be exactly the opposite of the list view and our RSS feeds order which uses chronological. There is absolutely nothing our calendar application can do to impact the reordering of events that the RSS widget applies, except by changing the event date. So if you want your January event to appear above the February in the RSS widget, you would need to change the event date to March. Obviously not something you want to do. If you want a sorting order other than reverse chronological you will need to find a different widget that supports that. If feedly similarly uses reverse chronological and does not support other orderings, you will need a different service.

I wish I had better news. But the odering of events in that widget, can not be impacted in any way by our calendar feed other than by changing the event dates. Which obviously will not work.

Cheers!

– Brook

Thanks Brook for looking into this further. Glad to see that you’re at least now seeing two different sort orders and it’s not just me insisting that such a phenomena exists over and over. Yikes.

As for the reverse chronological sort order being the reason, that makes sense since WordPress was/is blog software and so the most recent events should post on top. Reverse chronological also explains why both posts on a blog and those in the RSS widget or Feedly would be aligned.

How then to get the Tribe RSS feed to do what you want it to regarding readers like Feedly remains a problem for those wanting to use the feed to publicize their events in the same order as they appear on their calendars. If indeed the culprit is the pubDate, then perhaps what needs to happen is to rewrite the Tribe RSS feed to use the event date in the pubDate field instead?

Thanks again.

Howdy again,

We actually already replace the pubDate field with the start date. That is sort of the cause of the problem you are seeing. It was a conscious choice we made after much deliberation.

Ultimately RSS is a weird beast for events. RSS feeds are not really intended to ever contain future dates. But, people still want RSS feeds for their events. And so we have to hack together something to make it possible. If you’d like to see any of this behavior changed, please submit a feature request here: https://tribe.uservoice.com/forums/195723-feature-ideas That is where it will be the most visible, and thus can garner support from the community if it is indeed something people would want. If you search through there, you will notice that there was already a past request requesting the current pubdate behavior. One we finally implemented after enough votes for it.

Cheers!

– Brook

Hi Brook,
Thanks again for looking into this. At least now I feel we’re getting somewhere and not just arguing about whether or not there’s nothing wrong with the feed. Unfortunately, the decision to have the feed sort differently than the calendar makes zero sense to me. What was the rational for that? Why shouldn’t they be the same? Just don’t get it, sorry.

You’ll have to ask Feedly and WP Devs. But if I had to guess, their rational is simply to sort by chronological time and disregard our sorting. To reiterate, our plugin sorts exactly like you see in Chrome, the raw feed sorted proper as you expect. It is those apps that resort it chronologically, and we have not control over that nor did we have any input in how they decided to reorder things. SO I can not speak for their decision, nor is anything we could ever do ever in our plugin code going to change the order in their application.

Cheers!

– Brook