Feeds & Notifications in RC?

Is the Feed & Notifications functionality for Blogs included in the Release Candidate (v4.0.941.0) build?  I've been attempting to create a simple RSS feed for a Blog but am unable to get it to display any published posts.  I even went about creating a new, blank Sitefinity 4 instance:

1. Using the Project Manager created a new site named 'sf4demo'.
2. Browsed to the admin section to set up the database / admin profile.
3. Browsed Content > Blogs.
4. Created a new Blog named 'Blog Demo' with the default feed settings.
5. Created two sample posts within the new blog and ensured they were published.
6. Browsed Administration > Feeds & Notifications.
7. For the feed chose Actions > Run.
8. Clicked the 'RSS feed' hyperlink to view the feed.

The result is an empty feed.  I would expect that the two articles I had created to be shown?  In addition, when I choose to edit the feed the "Last publication on:" label is empty.

Hi Bob,

We were not able to reproduce the problem with steps provided testing on v4.0.941.0 and 4.0.962.0.
Is there any reason for using Actions > Run? Your feed should be active by default after a blog is created. Can you try to use build 4.0.962.0. and see whether the issue will appear at your end?

Greetings,
Neven Dinev
the Telerik team

Sorry for the late reply.  I've gone back and used the latest Sitefinity build (4.0.992.0) without luck.  I can see that there is a new table within the database (in the form dynmc_guid) which appears to be some sort of data-cache for the RSS feed in question, and it does contain summary information concerning the Blog the feed is associated.  However navigating to the actual feed through the link displays no results.

I am running the Sitefinity instance on IIS7 and have made customizations to the Visual Studio 2010 solution, including adding references to the Entity Framework assemblies.  I can't say for sure that what I've done caused the feeds to break -- Is there any diagnostic output I can hook to or dump that would assist my troubleshooting?

I appreciate your assistance!

I have finally been able to resolve this issue.  It turns out when you create and publish a Blog Post Sitefinity will flatten the data into a dynamic table of the form "dynmc_hash" where hash is a random value.  Inspecting the table I could see that the Expiration date of each item was set to the Publication date of the item.  This makes no sense, as I had not chosen a publish/expire range for any of the items, and I can clearly see by querying the [sf_blog_posts] table that no item has an expiration date set.  This is probably a SF4 bug.

Ultimately to rectify this I removed the Expiration Date from the data-structure.  Doing this can be done by:

- Navigate Feeds & Notifications > [Feed Name]
- Choose Advanced Change Data structure...
- Remove the Expiration Date column
- Save Changes

Of course this will cause expired items to show in your RSS feed, but shouldn't be too much of an issue because if a user attempts to navigate the link Sitefinity will still honor the expiration date and not show the item.

Now my issue is that for any new published Blog Post the publication date is being set to the MINIMUM amongst all published dates for the Blog.  Nice.  It never ends with this product.

Hi Bob,

Currently the data item is removed from the RSS if you delete it. When you set publication and expiration dates and the item expire we do not remove it from the feed. We have a task to implement this functionality - removing the data item from the feed when the item expires. We will fix the issue in one of the next weekly builds, most probably the solution will be included in the internal  build that we will ship next week.

Kind regards,
Ivan Dimitrov
the Telerik team