Creating Multiple Feeds with the 11ty RSS Plugin

Creating a feed using the 11ty RSS plugin is pretty straightforward and doesn’t require much configuration. Less obvious to me was how to create a second feed for a filtered subset of my data. In this case I wanted to create a feed of only posts tagged with ‘Drupal’ that can be submitted to Planet Drupal.

Since the plugin required so little configuration, it wasn’t clear to me if there was a way to make the plugin aware of a second feed template. As it turns out, the plugin is smart enough to pick up on any number of feed templates, located anywhere in your codebase. I created a /src/_feeds directory that contained by default feeds.njk template and my new Drupal-specific drupal.njk template. As long as you add a unique permalink in this template’s json frontmatter, the plugin will generate a new feed for you. In this case I used:

  "permalink": "drupal.xml",

Next was determining how to filter my 11ty collection based on a specific tag. This quick tip on creating tag pages gave me what I needed. Instead of iterating through collections.all as I did in my default feed, I added the following tag filter:

{`%- for post in collections[ 'drupal' ] | reverse %`}

As a result, I had only my content tagged with Drupal. The resulting drupal.njk feed template looked like this:

---json
{
  "permalink": "drupal.xml",
  "eleventyExcludeFromCollections": true,
  "metadata": {
    "title": "Brian Perry",
    "subtitle": "A collection of my Drupal related posts",
    "url": "https://brianperry.dev/",
    "feedUrl": "https://brianperry.dev/feed.xml",
    "author": {
      "name": "Brian Perry",
      "email": "heybrianperry@gmail.com"
    }
  }
}
---
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xml:base="{{ metadata.url }}">
  <channel>
    <title>{{ metadata.title }}</title>
    <link>{{ metadata.url }}</link>
    <description>{{ metadata.subtitle }}</description>
    <language>en</language>
    {%- for post in collections[ 'drupal' ] | reverse %}
        {% set absolutePostUrl %}{{ post.url | url | absoluteUrl(metadata.url) }}{% endset %}
        <item>
            <title>{{ post.data.title }}</title>
            <link>{{ absolutePostUrl }}</link>
            <description>{{ post.data.feed_excerpt | htmlToAbsoluteUrls(absolutePostUrl) | feedEncode }}</description>
            <pubDate>{{ post.date | dateToRfc822 }}</pubDate>
            <dc:creator>{{ metadata.author.name }}</dc:creator>
            <guid>{{ absolutePostUrl }}</guid>
        </item>
    {%- endfor %}
  </channel>
</rss>

Now all I have to do is write some Drupal related posts…