Possible to customize blog/rss.xml content (not RSS LISTING MODULE) via HUBL?

[nathan_virtue]

I contacted Hubspot support and I've seen quite a few articles covering how you can use HUBL to configure the RSS LISTING MODULE in Hubspot Blog Templates

BUT...

My understanding of templates and an RSS LISTING MODULE, are these only apply to the front end display on Hubspot hosted pages and NOT the xml file that is served up as the rss feed (/blog/rss.xml).

Is that correct?  Can that rss.xml file be adjusted at all where it lives?

We're trying to solve a few problems around the limitations the default Hubspot RSS feed presents as we need to be able to import full content out of Hubspot and into our platform via RSS feed.

Challenges:

-number of items limited to 50.  We need full archive of entire blog.

-featured image only shows in the <description> tag and not the <content> tag when showing full blog content in RSS feeds (IE show summaries is DISABLED).  My understanding of RSS spec is it is not good practice to include HTML in the <description> tag, but regardless of that, we need it in the <content> tag

-featured image DOES show in the <content> tag when 'show summaries in RSS' is enabled but then you don't have the full html content of the post!

Hubspot support continues to provide an answer that it IS possible to do this through Templates>Modules>HUBL, but as far as I can see, that only controls what is physically included on the Hubspot hosted web pages and not that rss.xml file.  I can definitely, though the configuration of a RSS LISTING module, control how many posts and the nature of those posts within the side panel of a Hubspot Blog page, but I have no idea how to configure the blog/rss.xml file from that templates section

If anybody can confirm these 2 things I will be indebted!

1.  Can HUBL and TEMPLATES allow configuration of the RSS feed itself (not the RSS LISTING) which is served at blog.xml
2.  If it is possible, how do you ensure your HUBL is reflected at blog.xml OR another URL of your choice?

Thank you!

[lscanlan]

Hi @nathan_virtue,

You're right about HubL solutions only working on the front end. It's an HTML templating language. So while it is possible to do some more customization that way, I think it's not going to be the right solution for you here.

There are some limited customizations to the RSS feed that you can make through your Blog Settings. Based on what you described, it's not going to be what you want I think, but you can read about those options here: https://knowledge.hubspot.com/articles/kcs_article/cos-blog/manage-your-blog-settings. Basically you can increase the number of posts per feed, with a limit of 50. You can also remove or include the summaries.

Have you considered building an RSS feed (as opposed to using the HubSpot default one) by pulling the content through the CMS blog post API? Or if the goal is actually to just pull content, then I wonder if you'd even need to create a feed at all. But for example you could pull all of the blog posts through the endpoint documented here: https://developers.hubspot.com/docs/methods/blogv2/get_blog_posts. Featured images will get pulled in this way in their own field. I think by using this method, you'd be able to get all the content that you need.

Let me know if you have any follow-up questions to this.

 - Leland