A patch for RSS Polling that sets the date of imported posts to the corresponding pubDate values in the RSS feed. Even better if there is a setting to set the topic creation to pubDate or “now” (current behavior). Tested with archive.org and ivoox.com.
RSS Polling is wonderful but it also causes a lot of tedious manual work when we activate a new feed, because the dates of the posts need to be changed manually. We are talking about importing feeds with hundreds of posts.
When do you need it done?
As soon as possible. We can use a fork of RSS Polling, with the hope that the Discourse team will like the implementation and eventually merge the patch.
What is your budget, in $ USD that you can offer for this task?
I can’t estimate the cost but if you send me a ballpark or rough estimate, I will answer quickly. This missing feature is costing me hours of tedious work in my hobby time. I value my hours, and yours too.
This version provides a rss_polling_use_pubdate setting, which is disabled by default (in this case behaving just like Discourse’s official plugin). If you enable it, the topics are created with a date following the pubDate value in the RSS feed entries. Just what I needed!
If you want to try it, you need to add this plugin AND remove the official one. Your existing RSS feeds will remain untouched (no need to create them again). When you are done testing, you can leave it or switch back to the official. The DISCLAIMER about this is free software, use at your own risk, etc, applies here.
Tested on iVoox.com and Archive.org. I haven’t tested it on WordPress yet, but it should work for any RSS feed following the protocol.
This topic is resolved for me. I hope the Discourse team likes the patch and integrates it in the official release. Meanwhile, I have left this version running on our Discourse.
Above I have shared three links to three real categories filled with hundreds of posts imported respecting their publication date and going several years back. I didn’t edit a single date, it was all done by the improved plugin automatically.
I have checked the links and the three are correct. Yes, all the posts you see there are imported. In the stock version, all of them would appear as published yesterday / on Monday. Using the improved version, the publication date corresponds to the RSS feed’s pubdate.
This saves humongous amounts of time for people using the RSS Polling plugin to import not just current posts but also the history of posts of a website.
