One of the really cool things in SharePoint is that almost every list in it has an RSS feed associated with it. Unless specifically set to not emit an RSS feed, all lists have a feed associated with them.
Carry out the following steps to ensure RSS is enabled on a site collection:
- From the site's home page, select Site Settings from the Site Actions menu.
- On the Site Settings page, under the Site Administration section, select the RSS link.
- This opens up the page that allows us to enable or disable RSS feeds. Ensure that the Site Collection RSS and Enable RSS section check boxes are checked.
- Add in any of the Advanced Settings information that may be required. We won't be using it in our demos, but in production these might be needed.
- Finally, click on the OK button and SharePoint will save the settings.
The basic question of how to customize the feed from each list comes up a bit and that procedure is actually quite simple.
- Navigate to the list that we want to customize.
- At the top, click on List in the List Tools section.
- In the list ribbon, click on the List Settings icon. If the icon is disabled, you may be viewing the site anonymously and will need to login from the link at the top left.
- Under Communications is a link for RSS settings. Click on that link.
The Modify RSS Settings page has a lot of information that can be customized, from the ability to turn off RSS altogether, down to what columns from the list should be included in the RSS description. The following example is a screenshot of this page:
After customizing the content, click on the OK button to save changes.
Now that we have the feed customized, where's the link? Good question. Back on the default view for the list, click on List in the List Tools menu to display the list ribbon. The list ribbon includes a link for the RSS Feed in the middle. Click on it and the feed will open in the browser. Copy the URL because we will use it in the next step of our RSS reader.