I'm testing out Moodle 1.7 in preparation for an upgrade of our live Moodles from 1.5 over the summer.
I had a problem last week where I was getting very slow page loads (~30 secs) and the right-hand column and page footer weren't showing. Following a suggestion from someone in these forums I traced it to the RSS feeds block, so I deleted the block and the page started loading completely, and in only 2 or 3 seconds. I then re-installed the same block (rss_client), and the page continued to render correctly and fast.
Today I tried adding an RSS feed to the block, and the problem has come back. Very slow page loads, and the HTML gets truncated at the point where the RSS block should appear. The feed validates correctly when I test it, but it doesn't display, the block (and all the code after it) just dies. I've tried searching the forums to see if there's a fix for this, but none of the things mentioned in the threads I've looked at have got it working. I've got Error Reporting set to E_ALL in php.ini, but I'm getting no errors reported. It doesn't seem to be theme-related, as I've got my theme set to Standard, and it's still not working.
I've looked on moodle.org for a later version of the block, but the block has disappeared completely. All I can find is something created by the Open University which is designed for 1.8.
To clarify, I'm not trying to create RSS feeds from forum posts or anything else within Moodle, I'm just trying to link to external feeds like the BBC one at http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_uk_edition/front_page/rss.xml - this feed works perfectly well in 1.5, but in 1.7 it kills the page.
Can anyone suggest a fix for this, please, or point me to a later, 1.7-compatible, version?
Chris
