News Portlet

Many companies provide latest news as RSS news feeds. RSS (really simple syndication) is a standardized method for distributing information. An RSS feed is an XML document which contains structured data (for example a title, a summary, and a link) so that it can be processed by computers.

With CMS Fiona, such feeds can be generated automatically in such a way that the access permissions of the portal users are taken into account when the feeds are delivered by the Portal Manager. This means that the news feeds can be personalized. All RSS versions (0.90, 0.91, 0.92, 0.93, 0.94, 1.0, and 2.0) are supported.

For logged-in portal users, the portlet marks the articles that have already been read. In the overview, these articles can then be hidden or displayed in a simplified manner. For the formats RSS 0.93, 0.94, and 2.0 and Atom 0.3 and 1.0, CMS Fiona 6.7.0 and later also compares the publication dates of the articles with the dates at which the user has read them. This is done for the purpose of marking updated articles as unread again.

Using this portlet requires a separate license.

Operation

The news portlet has two modes, viewing (view) and editing (edit). You can switch from one mode to the other by means of a button in the title bar. In the view mode, the portlet displays the articles of the (items) of the currently selected news feed. If several news feeds have been configured, you can use a selector to choose one:

Like a bookmark, each news feed consists of a name and the neews feed URL. In editing mode, this configuration data can be changed and news feeds can be resorted, added, or deleted. For this, the portlet displays a list of the feeds:

You can only switch to the editing mode, if the portlet is displayed with a border around it. The following screenshot illustrates how the title and the URL can be edited.

Configuration

The portlet is named news and its configuration can be found in the portlet.xml file. Three optional initialization parameters exist:

  • updateInterval defines the time in seconds after which the news feed is fetched again.
  • maxItems defines the maximum number of articles per user for which the portlet stores the read/unread state. Please choose a value twice the number of articles in your news feed. Otherwise news may reapppear as unread although the portlet user has read them.
  • maxItemLength defines the maximum text length of an article description. If the length of a description exceeds this value, it will be trimmed and '...' is appended to it.
Example for Setting Initialization Parameters
<init-param>
  <name>updateInterval</name>
  <value>5</value>
</init-param>
<init-param>
  <name>maxItems</name>
  <value>5</value>
</init-param>
<init-param>
  <name>maxItemLength</name>
  <value>160</value>
</init-param>

Furthermore, a setting exists, feeds with which any number of feeds can be preset for new users. Each feed definition consists of a name and the URL of the feed, separated by the | character. Therefore, neither the name nor the URL must contain this character. Example:

<portlet-preferences>
  <preference>
    <name>feeds</name>
    <value>
      Slashdot News|http://slashdot.org/index.rss
    </value>
    <value>
      Yahoo! News|http://rss.news.yahoo.com/rss/topstories
    </value>
  </preference>
</portlet-preferences>

Usage

By means of the following code the portlet can be placed into layout files:

<npspm includePortlet="/PM-PL/news" ... />

If the portlet is located in another web application, please specify its name instead of PM-PL.