Authenticated RSS feeds for private boards

[#1]

We need authenticated RSS feeds.

We want to be able to create a portal on our web site that shows a customer all of their interactions with our company through our various systems, including our home grown CRM, RNT support incidents and Lithium blogs and support forums. We have just begun offering private discussion boards for a sub-set of our customers. We would like to be able to provide a listing of the most recent threads in the private boards on our portal, including threads in the private boards to which they have access. In order to do this Lithium needs to offer authenticated RSS feeds.

[#2]

Actually, you could do this today just using our REST API.  Assuming that a user has permissions to see those boards in the first place, and they are authenticated, they will see the threads appearing on the portal landing page.  I'm not sure why you would want to use RSS for this.  RSS does return XML, but the REST API will also return XML, and it will also inlclude a lot more proprietary content from the Lithium application that you can additionally parse onto the portal / landing page (tags, kudos, accepted solutions, etc).

Now, if you want RSS to work so a user can get a feed of stuff they like to read that just so happens to be contained in a private board, that seems like a great request that I can get behind.  But if you want to syndicate community content out across the web (or in your case, a portal landing page) I would recommend that you use the Lithium REST API, rather than RSS for the XML content.

[#3]

We run a private community [i.e. registration/login is required to access content] where user interests are very specific. Private communities also tend to be lower-traffic sites. So folks want push notification of content they want to look at. Taken together, our users want exactly what JakeR refers to i.e. "a feed of stuff they like to read that just so happens to be contained in a private board".

My understanding of the specific issue is that Lithium's RSS servlet does not detect the user, so it doesn't have any authentication information. I'd suggest that this be incorporated as an enhancement.

As an additional idea, it would be nice to have a more streamlined RSS/email subscription interface for multiple boards - instead of a "subscribe to this board/topic", it would be a checklist of all accessible boards, and the user simply picks those of interest [genrally it would be either/or RSS vs. email]:

Board      RSS _notification Email_notification

all_boards [ ]                            [ ]

board_a     [  ]                           [x]

board_b     [x]                            [ ]

board_c     [x]                            [x]

Just as I posted this, one of our community members asked for: an option to "Subscribe to all" Forum areas". So I added an "all_boards" checkbox above as in many apps.