Creating a feed
A News Feed can be inserted into any page and will display a list of the latest news stories from a specified source. It automatically updates as new items are fed to that source.
To insert a feed into any page, navigate to that page, click the Add Content and select News Feed.
Choose the type of news feed you would like to insert.
- News stories from this site: This will have your feed summarise the content of a chosen News category. At this stage, you can also create another News category if necessary.
- External RSS/Atom feed: This will have your feed summarise the content of a specified external RSS/Atom feed, e.g. from the BBC News web site. Quite often, sites display an RSS logo
. You should be able to right click the logo and click Copy Shortcut. Then simply right click in address box in Firefly.NET news feed window and click Paste. Here are a couple of examples of RSS URLs:
- BBC News Online Headlines
http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_uk_edition/front_page/rss.xml - Arsenal.com News
http://www.arsenal.com/rssfeed - Resource folder feed: This will have your feed summarise changes to a specified folder in the Resources area.
- What's new - recently updated pages: This will have your feed summarise changes to a particular set of pages, section or even the site as a whole
- My feed - personalised News feed: This will have your feed display changes and updates according to subscription preferences chosen by you.
Having chosen what type of feed you would like to insert, you then need to specify a few options regarding how you would like your feed displayed, including:
- What style you would like them to appear as - options being "Normal", "Blog" or "Scrolling Ticker".
- How many of the latest stories you wish to have displayed - the available options being "Top 3", "Top 5", "Top 10" or "All".
You can also choose whether to include (not all of these options will be offered, depending on the type of news feed selected):
- Titles: check this box to display the Title of the page containing the story (this will be the link title unless specified otherwise in the Navigation tab of the Add/Modify Page dialog box.
- Publication dates: check this box to display the date of publication of the story (in dd/mm/yyyy format).
- Feed title: check this box to display the RSS feed title and the associated RSS icon
.
- Images: check this box if you would like to display a small thumbnail image - specified in the Description tab of the news item's page properties.
- Abstracts: check this box to show story 'abstracts' - a short description of the story which may (or may not) have been entered into the Abstract section of the Add/Modify Page dialog box (Description tab). Abstracts appear as a line below the news title.
Finally, click Save Changes. You're done! If you wish to move the News Feed component to a different position in the page, you can do so as with any other component by dragging the grey edit box at the top of the component: .
