Question

A WordPress build i am working on wants to pull in stories from rss feeds, and then allow users of the site to add comments and star ratings to each one.
It doesn’t really seem like the correct useage of rss to me, but is this sort of thing possible without importing/syncing the rss feeds with the database?

Answer 1

At the very least you need some way of associating ratings with a particular story. This means storing some unique ‘story’ identifier so you can retrieve it later and calculate its ratings and comments. You could get away with not syncing the entire feed if you could come up with a reliable means of identifying and associating the unique_id I mentioned.

Example:

#dbo.stories_comments
--------------------
|story_id | comment|
--------------------
| 12345   | Lorem..|
| abcde   | Ipsum..|
--------------------

Like I said, the tricky part is coming up with the story_id