CMF Syndication Services (syndication_tool) pre-design/proposal

Design Ideas Overview

I have been thinking about the implementation of syndication in the portal via RSS or other possible variants (i.e. MS cdf, Netscape's, etc..). This has led me to thinking that all portal folders should have the ability to syndicate their contents by calling a method on the folder. i.e. url/folder/fss which simply provides a content syndication on it's contents.

There is a definate need for syndication of content with the CMF. This is actually quite easy to do using the DC. The main issue will be how to implement this. I'd like feedback from other CMF users on their views as whether this should really be based on the folder, or possibly a drop in object with a folder. Other possible options I am not thinking of? I personally like the idea of hooking onto the portal folder, but there might be some good reasons why this would not be such a good idea.

This proposal will be expanded upon and become more detailed, but at this point I wanted to get something out to the other members so I could formulate before attempting to get this added to the 1.1 release of the CMF.

Areas which need More Consideration

What is the standard for Syndicating content? Are there various specifications? Which are most appealing to other members?

Permissions Caveats

These are some quick thoughts over permissions from several site administration view points:

Managers

*a. Some portal managers may not want their users to be able to syndicate any content. A switch should be made at the root of a portal which allows to completely turn off FSS. If a site allows for FSS, it should be switchable on a per folder basis (default being off).

*b. There should be someway to see what is being syndicated within a site (with new logging features being worked on, what's the possibilities of hooking some view on traffic of the syndicated folders within a site? Is this even important?)
Users

*a. Some users may not want the contents of thier folders to be syndicatable, so the above switching would satisfy these cases.
There must be other permissions based issues I've overlooked at quick glance....