Zikula Community

• **unknown user**
  
  

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  • Registered: Mar 16, 2002
  • Last visit: Feb 05, 2005
  • Posts: 4

  Posted: Feb 04, 2005 - 03:49 AM

  This is a great product -- a few questions though ...
  
  I want to include dates with my feeds. Actually, I want more control in several areas, but I'm willing to wait for further development.
  
  I'll be putting about 10 feeds on each page? Will this cause load time lag? Also, I'd like two 250 width feeds across the center, the
  rest falling underneath in the two columns.
  
  How best to do this, with blocks or in the newsmodule? Or by making your module my default. In other words, I want a real news look. Do you know of a site that uses it this way?
  
  Also what theme would you recommend?
  
  Keep up the outstanding work! Your dedication really appreciated,
  
  Ric

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• **unknown user**
  
  

  • Rank: Expert
  • Registered: Mar 16, 2002
  • Last visit: Oct 21, 2009
  • Posts: 1193

  Posted: Feb 04, 2005 - 11:33 AM

  garyland

  This is a great product -- a few questions though ...
  

  
  I assume you're talking about the RSSfeed and RSSdisplay modules (from www.mtrad.com).... Thanks for the compliment.
  

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  I want to include dates with my feeds. Actually, I want more control in several areas, but I'm willing to wait for further development.
  

  
  RSSfeed includes dates with feeds that it generates. RSSdisplay does not currently display dates. That sounds like an interesting suggestion...
  
  If you want to make suggestions for either the RSSfeed or RSSdisplay modules, it works best if you send them to me in email to crsATmtradDOTcom. I've been surfing the forums lately because of activity, but I don't always hang out here any more.
  
  I highly recommend that if you have a suggestion or bug report that you send them to me as soon as possible. I wrote these modules because I need their functionality. But as I'm coding, if I know about some valuable feature, I'll add it too. So, if you need/want something, you're more likely to get it if you ask sooner rather than later.
  

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  I'll be putting about 10 feeds on each page?
  

  
  There are a few problems with multiple rssblocks on the same page when using PN 750. The fixes will be in the next release of RSSdisplay. (If you need it now, let me know in email and I'll send you something.) Otherwise, there's no limit on the number of feeds except for how long people would wait to see the page display.

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  Will this cause load time lag?
  

  
  It will probably be noticeable. At least when the feeds aren't cached. It depends on how long it takes to retrieve the feeds. You could increase the cache timeout so that it doesn't happen as often. (But you'd have to hack that as I haven't had a chance to implement over-rides on cache timeouts.)
  

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  Also, I'd like two 250 width feeds across the center, the
  rest falling underneath in the two columns.
  
  How best to do this, with blocks or in the newsmodule? Or by making your module my default. In other words, I want a real news look. Do you know of a site that uses it this way?
  

  
  The newsmodule won't do what you want it to. I hadn't ever thought about making RSSdisplay the default module. (Hmmm... that's another interesting idea...)
  
  I don't know of a site that does what you're looking for except maybe for www.postnuke.com. Historically, there have been a number of themes/hacks/whatever that would allow your front page to just be a collection of blocks.... I'm pretty sure that someone on the forums would be able to point you to something like that.
  

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  Also what theme would you recommend?
  

  
  I'm a programmer, not a designer. ("Damn it Jim, I'm a Doctor, not a web designer!") So I'm not the right person to ask that question.
  
  I would think that you could probably do that kind of front page using Xanthia and pnRender pretty easily. But you ought to pose that question separately to get the attention of the XTE experts...

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• **unknown user**
  
  

  • Rank: Registered User
  • Registered: Mar 16, 2002
  • Last visit: Feb 05, 2005
  • Posts: 4

  Posted: Feb 04, 2005 - 04:43 PM

  Hi, Please look at this application. It generates a feed that meets all the requirements of a professional-like feed. Your application does basically the same thing, save for the date, which is crucial in a news enviroment.
  
  http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/feed/
  
  
  I figured out all the other controls and now have no serious complaints. I installed PN yesterday because of your module, and am happy I did. Here's the results so far: http://blacklogs.com
  
  I've got 20 feeds on the front page, or will have once I load them from your module. We'll see about the load time, although I'm thinking it may not be a problem if I try a couple of things. Any suggestions would be appreciated.
  
  I think your module is the best thing going for what I'm trying to do. I've tried them all and nothing works as smoothly. Tiki-Wiki doesn't even provide a way to get external feeds on its website.
  
  FeedtoJS (the app I refer you to) produces a feed that's extremely long to load even when you intall magpies in the same directory of your CMS.. All the others fail at something. So far, the only issue I've found with yours is the date thing, which I'm sure can be easily fixed.
  
  Your description length feature (by characters) seems to work flawlessly. I wanted 400 characters in the description and got 400 characters in the description.
  
  Of course, the key question is updating. As you will see, I pasted the code intoi the administrative news box. I'm hoping/assuming it will update there -- haven't had a chance to test that. If this happens than I'll be a very happy camper indeed.
  
  Oh, one other thing: that's date and time. These two pieces of information are almost as important as the feed itself.
  
  Ric

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• **unknown user**
  
  

  • Rank: Registered User
  • Registered: Mar 16, 2002
  • Last visit: Feb 05, 2005
  • Posts: 4

  Posted: Feb 05, 2005 - 12:29 AM

  Say, wait a minute. My feeds didn't update.
  
  Was I supposed to put an include somewhere?
  
  Ric

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• **unknown user**
  
  

  • Rank: Expert
  • Registered: Mar 16, 2002
  • Last visit: Oct 21, 2009
  • Posts: 1193

  Posted: Mar 19, 2005 - 06:39 AM

  garyland

  Say, wait a minute. My feeds didn't update. Was I supposed to put an include somewhere?

  
  The RSSdisplay and RSSfeed modules cache the feeds to improve performance for your visitors and to reduce the amount of traffic on the servers of the RSS feeds.
  
  This can cause confusion for folks who are not used to that and expect immediate display of any changes.
  
  The caches expire in an hour and are automatically refreshed the next time that someone accesses the feed.
  
  So, while you are debugging the presentation of feeds during setup, you need to clear the caches. This can be done by deleting all of the files in the cache directory.
  
  In a future release, we will provide a means to clear the cache from the admin menu.

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• **unknown user**
  
  

  • Rank: Expert
  • Registered: Mar 16, 2002
  • Last visit: Oct 21, 2009
  • Posts: 1193

  Posted: Mar 19, 2005 - 06:57 AM

  garyland

  Hi, Please look at this application. It generates a feed that meets all the requirements of a professional-like feed. Your application does basically the same thing, save for the date, which is crucial in a news enviroment.
  
  http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/feed/
  
  

  
  Yeah, this is a pretty good package for someone who doesn't have PN. It does pretty much all the same stuff as the RSSdisplay module. We're lucky to have PN to handle much of the rigamarole like installation and integration with other components.
  

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  I've got 20 feeds on the front page, or will have once I load them from your module. We'll see about the load time, although I'm thinking it may not be a problem if I try a couple of things. Any suggestions would be appreciated.
  

  
  RSSdisplay automatically caches feeds so that they only get retrieved once an hour. So the second time you display your page, it should go much faster (assuming that the first time was able to reach all of the feed servers and cache the results.)
  
  Of course, every hour someone is going to have a very slow display while RSSdisplay refreshes the cache for all those feeds. The way to improve that is to change the refresh interval. You should increase the cache refresh (sometimes called expiration) interval to approximate how often the feed actually changes. This reduces the number of times that you refresh the feed but get exactly the same information that you got before.
  
  Also, you change the refresh intervals so that they aren't the same - so that only one will expire for any single visitor. That spreads out the delays among all visitors. All visitors can get a slightly slower display but no visitor gets a hugely slower display.
  
  The only problem with changing the refresh/expiration interval is because this feature is not yet implemented in RSSdisplay or RSSfeed. It's on the ToDo list but at this point you'll have to hack it in. If you get something working, send it to me and I'll put it in the next release. :D And if you want to try to hack it, let me know and I can give you some pointers on how to do it.
  

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  Oh, one other thing: that's date and time. These two pieces of information are almost as important as the feed itself.

  
  Date and Time are retrieved from the feed but not included in any of the displays. It's pretty straight-forward to hack something in to display time & date.
  
  And it's on the ToDo list if you would prefer to wait.

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