How to properly place Date in <pubdate> element on RSS feed

Question

I'm using RSS Graffitty to post RSS items to a facebook page.

The app told me the items were missing the publication date so I added this tag:

echo "<pubdate>".$row['Date']."</pubdate>";

$row['Date'] is obtained from my MySQL database and it's a Datetime column.

How must I format it/echo it so it's recognized by the RSS feed? Must I change the element?

Thanks

Answer 1

RSS 2.0 specifications on the <pubDate> element should conform to the RFC 822 Date and Time syntax. Namely, to display it in the following format:

Fri, 21 Dec 2012 10:00:01 GMT

If you error run your RSS feed through the W3C Feed Validator you'll note these examples of valid RFC822 date-times:

<pubDate>Wed, 02 Oct 2002 08:00:00 EST</pubDate>

<pubDate>Wed, 02 Oct 2002 13:00:00 GMT</pubDate>

<pubDate>Wed, 02 Oct 2002 15:00:00 +0200</pubDate>

If you wanted to use MySQL formatting, you'd call the column with the following use of date_format(), adjusting the UTC modifier/marker as necessary:

date_format(Date, '%a, %d %b %Y %H:%i:%s')

Or you can do it via the PHP date method with DATE_RSS setting the format for you:

echo "<pubdate>".date(DATE_RSS, strtotime($row['Date']))."</pubdate>";

Make sure your <pubDate> element appear within its parent <item> node.

Also note that this element is case-sensitive. You must output pubDate with the capital D and not all lowercase (pubdate) as other elements can.

Answer 2

Just a hint: the -r switch in the php date function is the shorthand for the RFC 2822 format, which actually does yield a four digit year.

See PHP Doc for reference.