Zola: JSON Feed Option

[DocWatson]

Enhancement/feature request

I see RSS feed generation and there are plans for Taxonomy RSS feeds as well, but I like to build JSON feeds for my sites sometimes too. I have accomplished this with other static site generators (Hugo) by making a special template that essentially prints JSON. It's a little messy but it gets the job done. Having something like that out of the box would be a cool feature! Is it on the roadmap at all?

Perhaps the JSON Feed spec would be a good place to start. https://jsonfeed.org/version/1

If it's not in the works, I might have some time to take a stab at it in the coming weeks :)

[Keats]

I had never heard of JSON feed before but it shouldn't be too hard to add I assume: add a rss.json template in the default tera instance that gets the same data as the rss.xml one and render it.

I believe it would also need a special filter to escape JSON no? If so it might be worth adding it to Tera directly rather than just Gutenberg since it seems quite common

[Keats]

And feel free to do it! I haven't released Tera 0.11.8 yet so I can sneak a json_escape in it if needed

[DocWatson]

Thanks for the pointers! I haven't had time to dig in and make sense of anything yet, but I should have some tonight. I'll see what I can come up with! I have one of my Hugo sites almost ported over to Gutenberg so the test bed is almost ready 😈

[paulcmal]

it shouldn't be too hard to add I assume: add a rss.json template in the default tera instance that gets the same data as the rss.xml one and render it.

Could we maybe think of a more generic way of having custom output formats with themable templates? RSS, Atom, ActivityStreams, JSON Feed… There's so many different use-cases :o

Custom output formats with proper feeds support (with pagination available ¹) would be amazing. Should i open a separate ticket?

EDIT: Also related #293, a request for custom JSON templates aimed at client-side processing (i.e. in single-page applications).

[DocWatson]

This is a great idea. It might make more sense to be its own ticket -- if @Keats is on board, I say I just close this one out.

I am still interested in contributing...hopefully the ever-elusive free-time comes soon :)

[Keats]

Can I close this in favour of #365 or am I understanding it wrongly?

[DocWatson]

Yeah, it looks like the #365 is a more robust solution to the problem I'd like to solve. I'll go ahead and close it now :D

[JoelEllis]

Just wondering, has anything happened on the JSON Feed front? As far as I can see, nothing has been talked about on https://zola.discourse.group/, and no PRs have been merged. The most optimal solution, as far as I can see, is to expose all the data needed for a RSS or JSON feed to terra templates, provide some way to escape JSON and XML and leave people to it, but I’d love some out-of-the box way to do it, for example through a config option (preferably enabled by default).

[paulcmal]

to expose all the data needed for a RSS or JSON feed to terra templates

I believe that's precisely what we were discussing in #365. Do you agree? Once Custom Output Formats are standardized then it's merely a matter of shipping an internal default JSON feed template with zola.

[JoelEllis]

Yes, I agree. However, noting appears to be happening in that thread right now, and hasn’t for a few months. I can’t find any related conversations on the discourse, apart from the “assets” rfc.

[Keats]

New features were blocked until multi-lingual sites are working. They are now in 0.6 (the next branch currently) so once this is shipped, we can have a look at it again.