Add individual RSS feeds for articles in sNews 1.7

Today I was tinkering around with sNews and snooping through my EN.php language file, and to my surprise I noticed an unused language variable.

It appears as though at some point that was a plan to add RSS feeds for individual articles. This is a great idea in my opinion, so I decided tyo try and make it happen, without requiring too much hacking. This is the unused variable in EN.php here;

$l['rss_comments_article'] = 'RSS Comments for this article';

I was thinking about enabling this feature quite some time ago, and obviously someone else had the idea to add individual RSS feeds for each article before I did, so I figured it was time to code it in and make it available. I think this feature would be a great value to people wanting to track an article's comments to see if there has been a reply to a question or to just stay updated on bugs &/or changes.

I have made this as dead simple of a mod as I can, so backup your snews.php and work on a copy.

STEP 1) find function rss_contents, and add the following highlighted code, there are 2 small pieces, add them both;

    header('Content-type: text/xml; charset='.s('charset').'');
    $limit = s('rss_limit');
    $url = cleanXSS($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']);
    $start = strpos($url,'?')+1;
    $aid = substr($url,$start);
    $aid = str_replace("/", '',$aid); 
    if (ctype_digit($aid)) {
        $extra_sql = "articleid = '".$aid."' AND ";
    }
    switch($rss_item) {
        case 'rss-articles':
            $heading = l('articles');
            $query = _PRE.'articles'.' WHERE position = 1 AND visible = \'YES\' AND published = 1 ORDER BY date';
            break;
        case 'rss-pages':
            $heading = l('pages');
            $query = _PRE.'articles'.' WHERE position = 3 AND visible = \'YES\' AND published = 1 ORDER BY date';
            break;
        case 'rss-comments':
            $heading = l('comments');
            $query = _PRE.'comments'." WHERE ".$extra_sql." approved = 'True' ORDER BY id";
            break;
    }

STEP 2) Now find the comment form in the function comment, and add the following highlighted code;

$art_value = empty($articleSEF) ? $subcatSEF : $articleSEF;
echo '<div class="commentsrss"><a href="'._SITE.'rss-comments?'.$_ID.'">'.l('rss_comments_article').'</a></div>'."\r\n";
echo '<br /><div class="commentsbox"><h2>'.l('addcomment').'</h2>'."\r\n";

STEP 3) Now style the commentsrss class however you like, this is basically what I use, feel free to copy;

.commentsrss {
clear: both;
padding: 4px 36px 0 0; 
margin-bottom: 4px; 
height: 32px;
color: #000; 
vertical-align: middle;
text-align: right;
}
.commentsrss a {
font-variant: small-caps;
font-size: 1.2em;
color: #000;
text-decoration: none;
}

That's it, upload snews.php and you should have a link above each comment form that will allow your users to subscribe to the individual articles.

An example? Just look down, I'm using it on my own site here.