Category feeds don't indicate they are category feeds

[RuddO]

Okay guys, here is a patch for WordPress that properly titles and describes category RSS/Atom feeds. I didn't know how to set the URL for the feed to the URL of the category, so what I'm doing is just leaving the bloginfo URL as it is, but I hope you can whip that out from your fabulous hacking heads.

This patch makes sense because of several reasons. My personal reason is that I'm running a magazine with different sections (using categories as the section) at rudd-o.com, and I'm encouraging subscriptions to the section feeds instead of the whole magazine, but the feeds themselves don't say which category they're from. Now with this patch they do.

Another thing that I'm not sure about, and I'd like a response in the form of a comment here (I'm tracking this bug via RSS): do I have to htmlspecialchars() before doing the print's "..." in this patch? The question, more properly phrased, is: if I print a get_category_name(), should I print it htmlspecialchar()red, or should I just print it out, and trust that the WordPress category administrator won't let people type random HTML? Another way of posing the question would be: if I type an ampersand (&) in the category name, what should the theme display, "&" or "&"? This is keeping me up at night, need some sleep, please help =).

[RuddO]

Patch to make category feeds show actually category descriptions and names

[rob1n]

I think this is already done. My 2.2 blog has the category title in the <title> field in the category feed.

[RuddO]

But does it set the proper description? What about the URL for the corresponding HTML alternate page (the category archive)?

[rob1n]

True, and might as well give it an overhaul. Targeting 2.3.

[RuddO]

Updated patch for 2.2

[westi]

Hmm.

I am not sure about this.

As it is the current patch is too repetitive and a better proposal would be to introduce a new feed template function for the description field which contains the decision code and a filter for plugins to alter what is displayed.

Moving to 2.6 for now and marking as needs-patch

[Denis-de-Bernardy]

still needs patch

[peaceablewhale]

I will try to fix this in #9510.

[peaceablewhale]

The updated patch in #9510 should fix this as well.

[chriscct7]

#9510 would implement this if done

[stevenkword]

I am closing this ticket since the original problem has been addressed via the wp_title_rss() function. This function also already provides filters to customize the feed descriptions as needed.