Custom Atom feeds using Views

Question

I'm wondering if there's a way to make a view render an Atom feed with custom fields, that would output something similar to this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" ... xml:lang="en-US">
   <title type="text">my atom feed</title>
   <subtitle type="text">my atom feed subtitle</subtitle>
   <id>the feed's url</id>
   <rights type="text">some copyright</rights>
   <updated>2013-06-14T02:29:00Z</updated>
   <author>
      <name>me</name>
   </author>
   <generator>my feed generator</generator>
   <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="my site's url" />
   <link rel="self" href="the feed's url" />
   <my:field1>value1</my:field1>
   <entry type="my_type_1">
      <id>an article's url</id>
      <title type="html">article title</title>
      <summary type="html">article summary</summary>
      <published>2013-06-14T01:16:00Z</published>
      <updated>2013-06-14T01:47:40Z</updated>
      <author>
         <name>someone</name>
         <uri>the guy's bio page url</uri>
      </author>
      <content type="html">full body content in &lt;strong&gt;html&lt;/strong&gt;</content>
      <my:numeric_field>2</my:numeric_field>
      <my:yet_another_custom_field>hi there</my:yet_another_custom_field>
   </entry>
   <entry> ... </entry>
</feed>

The views_rss module can do stuff like this (in fact, I've already accomplished a lot using its hooks to define the fields, and field formatters to do stuff like <author><name>name taken from a user reference field in the node</name><uri>the user's url</uri></author>, but I can't find a similar module that provides the same functionality for Atom feeds.

Is there such a module out there? I've tried atom and views_atom without success. If not, how hard would it be to implement it? I guess this would involve making a "views plugin", with which I'm not really familiar.

Answer 1

You don't need a module to do that. You can use .tpl files to wrap rows in <entry> tags, fields in their tags and so on. It may be a bit less intuitive and more exhausting at first, but in the long run you will get exactly what you ask for, without compromises modules call for.