External API Question

[nickyker]

Firstly, thank you for creating the External API functionality, it’s awesome.

We are going through our looper providers and moving everything over to External API, and started with RSS feeds. We were previously using three plugins to achieve this, so it’s great to have a native solution. We have RSS Featured Image installed per your help video suggestion. We started with your RSS Feed template in each case, and adjusted the image parameter to media:thumbnail_attr.url per the help video. We also tried a number of other iterations e.g. media:image, image.

Our two use cases are:
Google News RSS feed.
Posts from another one of our sites.

The issues that we were hoping you could help with are:
Google News RSS feed. Appears to be pulling in the RSS feed ok, but is not outputting anything other than one date. We checked each of the parameters (e.g. title, content) but maybe we are using the wrong ones?
Posts from other site. Pulls in everything ok aside from images. We thought initially that it was because we are using a number of ACF fields for posts on that site, but the issue was the same when we tried with another of our sites also. Our goal is to have logo (featured image) on left hand side with text & categories on the right as shown in the formatted iteration. Any idea what we’re doing wrong here? Also, is there a way to randomize the output such that it randomly shows 10 posts of 80 total?

This is on a dev site, so there’s no live site to point you to. We made a quick capture of the issue which we’ll add in the private area below this message, along with the RSS URLs.

Many thanks in advance for your help!

[ruenel]

Hello @nickyker,

Thanks for writing in! In your “Content” Text element, add {{dc:looper:debug_consumer}}. This will display the debug icon and click on it so that you can see what the data being returned by the looper. This should help you get the names of the fields you’ll need to display the correct content in your layout.

Kindly let us know how it goes.

[nickyker]

Hi @ruenel,

Thanks for the debug suggestion.

For the posts feed, it helped us discover that our source feed didn’t include images, which we have now corrected. But, it didn’t fix the issue on the output end, even creating a separate field for img made no difference. Do you know of a way to randomize the output such that it shows 10 random posts of 80 total?

For the Google News feed, there was nothing in the feed that would cause the odd behavior that we’re seeing where it only outputs the header title, nothing else.

Would be grateful if you could take a look at this for us. Thanks.

[ruenel]

Hello @nickyker,

Thanks for updating in. You cannot randomize the output because you are only relying upon whatever is returned by the feed URL. I am using this

And I only get 1 article:

Please check the source feed URL.

Thanks.

[nickyker]

Thanks @ruenel

We fixed the Google Alerts feed issue by replacing the feed, but are still having the same issue with no output despite using the correct fields. We’re also still having the same issue with images not appearing on our posts feed.

Any idea what might be causing this?

Thanks in advance for your help.

[ruenel]

Hey @nickyker,

Please provide us access to your site. You can create a secure note in your next reply with the following info:
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To know how to create a secure note, please check this out: How The Forum Works

Best Regards.

[nickyker]

Many thanks, the info is attached

[charlie]

The Google RSS subscription has ended. However I think I know what the disconnected is for the featured image. The RSS feed looper is already looping the “item” tags of the RSS. So it doesn’t have access to the “image” tag. At the very bottom of the sample page, I’ve created a sample for you. Essentially you are going to loop twice. Once over “channel” tag, so you can access the featured image, and then over each “item” tag. Or call the API twice, once to grab the feature image and then again to loop over the items. With caching you would only ever grab it once per page load. I did not see a featured image per “item” tag so you might need the following plugin. Let us know if this helps, have a great day.

RSS Featured Image

[nickyker]

Many thanks @charlie That really helps!

[ruenel]

It’s the least that we can do for you, @nickyker.