Today, in a creative outburst, I created a better RSS 2.0 Template for Movable Type. Unlike the SixApart supplied MT RSS 2.0, this template uses all built-in RSS elements.

The thing about MT’s RSS 2.0 template was that is used RSS namespaces to provide functionality that was provided in the RSS spec. That seems pointless, and very wrong. For my template I pulled heavily from the knowledge from this post at the etc blog. This showed me how to get the full entry out of MovableType.

However, unlike the template posted at the above article, my template does not syndicate comments. Why not? There is no specification for comments in RSS 2.0. Read the RSS 2.0 Spec. There is a comments element in the item object, however that just contains a URL to the comments page.

Also, unlike the above URL, my template does not require namespaces to provide functionality already provided by the base standard. In fact, this template only uses RSS elements from the base standard. My template is also 11 lines shorter (of course, the expanded feed will be much bigger, given that it’s outputting full text.)

Download the Wilcox Development Solutions Movable Type RSS 2.0 Template

I plan move my site to using this template exclusively (maybe with one option for summary RSS), but for now you can subscribe to the RSS feed generated by this template.

Also, see this post over on decaffeinated.org for more on the issue