theshaft

You can check the add-meta-tags plugin. Actually, I updated this plugin today and added the features some users had requested. I hope it covers your needs.

First things first. Even if it had worked this way, the feed would never validate, because there is no XML namespace that describes the usage of the <commentcount> item element. Here you can read about the RSS 2.0 Specification.

So, you need to put the function somewhere inside the description or the content:encoded item elements.

For example, if you serve only summaries, then edit the <description> item element to the following:

<description><![CDATA[<?php the_excerpt_rss(); _e('<br />Comments: '); echo get_comments_number(); ?>]]></description>

or something like that:

<description><![CDATA[<?php the_excerpt_rss(); _e('<br />'); comments_popup_link('No Comments »', '1 Comment »', '% Comments »'); ?>]]></description>

Hope it helps.

Hmm, I had a feed reader which runs on the client side in mind when replying. I do not really know how MagpieRSS works. From the feature list:

Integrated Object Cache
Caching the parsed RSS means that the 2nd request is fast, and that including the rss_fetch call in your PHP page won’t destroy your performance, and force you to reply on an external cron job. And it happens transparently.

HTTP Conditional GETs
Save bandwidth and speed up download times with intelligent use of Last-Modified and ETag.

If you set it to not to cache the already fetched entries, I guess there will be a bandwidth or server load problem.

I think it’s easy to add the total number of comments in the RSS item’s summary or content, but the problem would be that each reader would see the number of comments your post had at the time the feed was retrieved from your blog. So, I think it does not make any sense including any statistics in the feed.

I’ve written a small plugin to display recent comments for my own needs. Don’t know if it would suit yours, but you can try it: Simple Recent Comments

You can take a look at my sidebar to see what it looks like.

Updated to version 0.2

From the changelog:
– Added a WordPress version check, so that the option to include licensing info in the feeds does not appear in older WP version than 2.0.
– Added an informational section in the configuration page about the template tags that can be used in the theme.
– Added success message after successful license reset.
– Added success message after successful license code submission.
– Added error message if license code does not seem valid.
– Added some Creative Commons license code verification. Seems to work with all licenses, but is very primitive. Only the basic HTML code structure is checked.
– The default licensing info message that is displayed after the post’s body was modified.
– Added one more option. Now a user can define some custom code that will be displayed
together with the default message below the post’s body.
– Added some template tags that can be used by a user on a theme.
– More modularization of the code.
– Minor fixes, so it works properly with other CC licenses, eg Developing Nations, Sampling etc.
– Minor form HTML code fixes.

It has been updated to version 0.4
Configuration is done from within the administration panel:
Options->Syndication Extra

Your feedback is welcome.

Also you can have a look at some guide I have written in order to make it compliant with the Atom 1.0 spec.

https://www.raoul.shacknet.nu/2005/12/08/wordpress-atom-feed/

I used the latest diff file while I was experimenting with the Atom feed (and actually provide a link to the page you mentioned). It took some days because I wanted to see the actual results in the search engines. I was not aware that I could login to the Trac using this account. I have some feedback to submit.

The reasons I wrote this article were:

• to help current wordpress 1.5.2 users have a valid Atom 1.0 feed without having to patch or modify any other files, except for wp-atom.php
• to help them, through a small example, understand how to customize their Atom feed and add more features using RSS modules

…and I totally disagree with the fact that the Atom 1.0 implementation will be delayed until WP v2.1.