[RFC] RSS Feeds from Collections about astro HOT 2 CLOSED

I really like this! Seems to really align nicely with the createCollection ideas that we already have. Some random thoughts:

• Is combining many collections into a single RSS feed something that we want to support? I don't have a real-world example so can't really say how important that is to solve here vs. not worrying about it.

• It would also be great to demo this on the snowpack.dev example directory. Could we add an RSS feed for news items?

• Actually that brings up a good question: we aren't currently treating news items as a collection on the Snowpack.dev site. Obviously we could, but it feels a bit like boilerplate if the current "just load it in the component script" is working for us as users, since we plan to keep it all on a single page anyway.

What about something like import {createRSSFeed} from 'astro/runtime' that you could call anywhere? If that existed, could that function do everything and you just call it inside of createCollection()? That could nice from a flexibility standpoint, but obviously if there are blockers then migrating the News page of Snowpack.dev to use createCollection isn't the end of the world (from the point of view of a user).

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Is combining many collections into a single RSS feed something that we want to support?

I don‘t think so. The current plan was just to add multiple <link> tags to your site

It would also be great to demo this on the snowpack.dev example directory. Could we add an RSS feed for news items?

Yeah! That’d be a good test.

Actually that brings up a good question: we aren't currently treating news items as a collection on the Snowpack.dev site. Obviously we could, but it feels a bit like boilerplate if the current "just load it in the component script" is working for us as users, since we plan to keep it all on a single page anyway.

The nice part about Astro.fetchContent() is you can use that anywhere. If you don‘t need pagination, you don‘t have to use a collection.

What about something like import {createRSSFeed} from 'astro/runtime' that you could call anywhere? If that existed, could that function do everything and you just call it inside of createCollection()?

The original goal was just to save you having to load data in two places, but you do raise a good point: there‘s nothing specifically tying an RSS feed to a collection. I do think that “calling it anywhere” could introduce some complications, such as determining its final URL, can it be loaded from components, etc. and we’d have to throw a lot of errors if it‘s used unexpectedly. We could also start talking about the idea of non-HTML .astro components too (e.g. /rss.astro.xml)!

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