Product update: PloneRSS

What is PloneRSS

Essentially it's a product for bloating your site's content using information pulled in from other sites using RSS news feeds. It has many valid uses including content aggregation for regular portal users, and a few less valid ones such as growing your content for SEO purposes. Either way it's quite a handy tool which provided you with a searchable history of news items, indeed it can be quite a useful way to index a mailing list.

Click here to visit the project page.

How does it work?

• Feed definitions - these point at news feed URL's on the internet and can be created by any user with some writable workspace. They work off a standard work-flow mechanism and the system admin can choose whether feeds are live immediately, or only when published by a reviewer.
• Instance definitions - each instance definition can point to one or more feeds and
  these provide a mechanism for combining flows from one or more available feeds.
• RSS manager - is a global control that updated feed definitions periodically, typically you might call the RSS manager every 10 minutes using a CRON job. The manager is responsible for maintaining update intervals and duplicate feeds, if half a dozen people define the same feed, it should update from the source only once to avoid blacklisting.
• RSS news items - these items are very similar to normal news items but live within the RSS manager's folder and have tags that d efine where they have come from, which will allow you to list items against specific feeds or groups of feeds.
• The RSS portlet - you can add as many of these as you like to your site and indeed you can add different combinations to each page. Each portlet defines;
• How many items are to be displayed

• 

  The source of the items, i.e. an instance definition
• What state we should look for, typically this is always published

The latest version is very new so be prepared for issues, if you feed them back via the issue tracker we will attempt to clear what we can as quickly as possible. PloneRSS is licensed under the GPL and is free to use and distribute, however we accept no liability with regards to it's use or for any faults it may have.