Support itunes:image syntax in RSS Polling plugin

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The discussion centers on adding support for the itunes:image syntax in the RSS Polling plugin, a feature important for media-related RSS feeds like podcasts. icaria36 initiated the request, noting that while RSS Polling works with iTunes-compatible feeds, it fails to recognize image tags such as <itunes:image href="..."/>. icaria36 and RGJ agreed to implement the feature and sought feedback from Discourse maintainers. pmusaraj confirmed openness to a pull request (PR). RGJ later submitted the PR after a delay, which was merged. icaria36 confirmed the feature works in production, citing a live example. A user, Jagster, mistakenly thought this enabled podcast hosting in Discourse, but icaria36 clarified the feature only improves image handling in RSS feeds, not hosting capability. The feature request is now resolved, with thanks to RGJ and the Discourse team.

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When it comes to media-related RSS, basically podcasts and music, iTunes is a big player, so big, that some media platforms ensure to be compatible with iTunes’ RSS more than with W3C’s RSS. In practice, RSS Polling works just fine with these feeds, excepts that it doesn’t recognize the syntax for images. It looks like this:

<itunes:image href="https://static-2.ivoox.com/audios/7/c/f/6/7cf68a790f570a1809c6ba30ba2ca2f2_XXL.jpg"/>

Some RSS services / apps will be adapted to recognize this syntax and show an image. For instance, I have tested this with https://antennapod.org/ . It would be great if RSS Polling could recognize this syntax and poll the images as well.

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Just a note to say that @RGJ and I have agreed to tackle this feature.

It would be interesting to know whether the Discourse maintainers would welcome it as a PR, or at least whether they would be open to the idea. :slight_smile:

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Yes, I think we’re open to a PR that adds support for itunes:image syntax. Thanks!

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Just a note to say that @RGJ has a patch that I have tested and it works (proof). :tada: Thank you, Richard!

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So 6 months later it was pointed out to me that I forgot to create the actual PR…

Here it is Support itunes:image by communiteq · Pull Request #91 · discourse/discourse-rss-polling · GitHub

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Does that mean that after this PR I can start host podcasts using Diacourse?

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This PR does exactly what the title of this topic says, and is unrelated to the possibility of hosting podcasts in Discourse. :slightly_smiling_face:

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That is big part of that, because feed of podcasts are there already :man_shrugging:

So, it is just to give a try then.

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This patch was merged, I installed the new version, and it works (see this real example of a feed imported today).

This feature request can be resolved. Thank you very much @RGJ and Discourse team!

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