Can't get RSS feed block to get executed

Question

I am trying to develop an improvement to a previously made module called "magento-stock-movements". So I created a separate module under the same NameSpace using a guide like this one.

The goal is for this to be an admin/backend only RSS feed like "Notify Low Stock" that updates each time there is a stock movement on Magento. I tried every config.xml setting I could possibly find under the sun, but nothing changed. And trust me I have refreshed the cache and reindexed Magento ad nauseam. I just get a page with an XML header and no content, no exceptions, no PHP fatal errors, no logs, nothing every time I go to mywebsite.com/index.php/rss/catalog/stockmovements.

All my code is on github for example. Has anyone tried to do this before? Can anybody point me in the right direction?

Answer 1

Turns out that the guide I was using neglected to say that inside the config.xml that you should enter the layout xml file location like this:

<frontend>
    <layout>
        <updates>
            <yourlayoutxmlfilename>
                <file>yourlayoutxmlfilename.xml</file>
            </yourlayoutxmlfilename>
        </updates>
    </layout>
</frontend>

And also adding your yourlayoutxmlfilename.xml file to /app/design/frontend/base/default/layout/ with contents like this:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<layout>
    <rss_catalog_yourblockname>
        <block type="rss/catalog_yourblockname" output="toHtml" name="rss.catalog.yourblockname" />
    </rss_catalog_yourblockname>
</layout>

This was so hard to debug because it was just misconfiguration which is a silent error.

I figured this out while studying this question on Stackoverflow: Custom RSS feed in Magento