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Creating News and News Feeds in the Editorial System

Functions for Creating News Feeds

The following functions for creating news feeds are available in the CMS:

  • In the system settings, channels can be defined. Channels serve to group news by topic, i.e. to categorize them with respect to what their contents is about. This is similar to categorizing product descriptions by means of a field named ProductGroup. The channel settings can be accessed via the Content Navigator's System Configuration menu item available in the Extras menu.

  • The versions of files of the Folder and Document type have a built-in field named channels. This is a multi-selection field; therefore, any subset of the channels that have been defined in the system configuration can be assigned to it. This is how content and a set of channels are associated with each other.

  • File formats have the canCreateNewsItem field (Mark as new on the live server). If this option has been chosen, files based on this format are added to an internal news list upon release unless the channels field of the released version is empty.

  • Lists of news article files can be created in which the articles are assigned to any set of channels you determine. For this, an NPSOBJ instruction and a Tcl command is available. The NPSOBJ instruction returns, analogous to the toclist instruction, a context list, so that the fields of the version can be queried. The Tcl command is news.

Using the npsobj newslist Command

For creating news lists in layouts the npsobj newslist command can be used in three ways:

  • Creating a list of all news articles in all channels:

    <npsobj newslist="all" length="20">
  Text evaluated for each news article
</npsobj>

  • Creating a news list where each article is contained in at least one of several channels assigned to a field of the document being exported:

    <npsobj newslist="selected" name="Channel-Feld" length="20">
  Text evaluated for each article belonging to the channels specified indirectly
</npsobj>

    The field must be either of the string, text, selection, or multiselect type. With the string and text types, the channels must be a comma-separated list. With selection and multiselect fields, the field values are used unmodified as channels.

  • Creating a list of news assigned to channels that are specified directly:

      <npsobj newslist="selected" value="ch1, ch2, ..." length="20">
  Text evaluated for each article belonging to the channels specified directly
  </npsobj>

Even if a news article has been assigned to more than one of the channels specified directly or indirectly, it is never contained more than once in the news list generated.

Generated news lists only include articles whose publication date lies in the past (relative to the export time of the document containing the list). Of course, the news list internally contains all of the articles to which a channel has been assigned and that were chosen for publication via the canCreateNewsItem file format field. Initially, the publication date equals the creation date of the news file. If required, this date can be modified via the validFrom field of the draft version.

A news article that was published accidentally can therefore be removed from the news list by specifying a future date as the publication date. However, after this change it is still contained in the internal news list unless the news file itself is deleted or all channels are removed from the channels field of the article. A file is also removed from the news list if the channels to which the article is assigned are deleted from the system configuration. However, this does not modify the channels field of versions, meaning that it may contain the names of nonexistent channels. News articles assigned to nonexistent channels are not placed into the internal news list again if the missing channel is created again.

If the Template Engine is used, all the files containing an npsobj newslist instruction are exported again after changes have been made to files or the channel configuration so that the news lists generated are always up-to-date. (A usesAll dependency is assigned to the files.)

Examples

Creating a list of 10 most recently published articles

  • Create a channel named sitenews.

  • Create a file format named newsitem and activate its canCreateNewsItems (Mark as new on the live server) option.

  • Create a file named news1 based on the newsitem format anywhere in the folder hierarchy.

  • Into the layout of the start page insert code like the following:

    <ul>
  <npsobj newslist="all" lenght="10">
    <li>
      <npsobj insertvalue="anchor" destination="self">
        <npsobj insertvalue="var" name="title" />
      </npsobj>
  </npsobj>
</ul>

Creating an RSS feed for politics news

  • Create a channel named politics;

  • Create a file format named newsitem and activate its canCreateNewsItems (Mark as new on the live server) option.

  • Create a field named description and a file format named feed and add description to the format. Do not activate canCreateNewsItems.

  • Create a folder named rssfeeds.

  • In this folder create a base layout (mastertemplate) that outputs an RSS-Feed (see below).

  • In the same folder, create a file named politicsfeed based on the feed format. Enter as description "Latest company politics news". As Channels specify politics.

  • Set the main content of the base layout to the following:

    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE rss PUBLIC "-//Netscape Communications//DTD RSS 0.92//EN"
  "http://my.netscape.com/publish/formats/rss-0.92.dtd">
<rss version="0.92">
<channel>
  <description>
    <npsobj insertvalue="var" name="description" />
  </description>
  <language>de</language>
  <title><npsobj insertvalue="var" name="title" /></title>
  <link>http://www.mysite.com/</link>
  <copyright>(c) JustRelate Group GmbH</copyright>
  <generator>CMS Fiona 6.0</generator>
  <ttl>60</ttl>
  <npsobj newslist="selected" name="channels" length="20">
    <item>
      <title><npsobj insertvalue="var" name="title"/></title>
      <link>http://www.mysite.de<npsobj
        insertvalue="var" name="visiblePath" />
      </link>
      <description>
        <npsobj insertvalue="var" name="description"/>
      </description>
    </item>
  </npsobj>
</channel>
</rss>

For creating an RSS file in a different version (2.0, for example), the layout file can be adapted as desired.

To create another feed, sports news, by means of the layout file above:

  • Create a channel named sports.
  • In the folder rssfeeds create a file named sportsfeed based on the feed format and enter "Sports News" into its description field. Select sports as channels.
  • Now create files based on the newsitem format and assign to them the sports channel. They will appear in the sports news feed.

Sending out Newsletters

  • Create a folder named newsletters.
  • Write a base layout that generates the contents of the news letter by, for example, reading out fields of the files concerned.
  • Create a file folder named newsletter.
  • In the folder newsletters create a file named politics based on the newsletters format.
  • Into the main content of politics enter the e-mail addresses, on address per line.
  • Write a wizard that sends the exportBlob field of politics to each e-mail address contained in the main content of politics.
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