Feeds

Overview

A web feed is a summary of a Website's news, files, and other activities that it distributes or syndicates to other Websites and individual users. RSS is an acronym for "Rich Site Summary" (sometimes also used as Really Simple Syndication). Indeed, RSS files are a nearly painless way to syndicate news and articles from one site to many. For instance, RSS files can be used to gather Slashdot news and Freshmeat releases, and display them on your Tiki. RDF is the Resource Description Framework, see links below.

Tiki is remarkably flexible when it comes to feeds. It can both display external feeds from other sites in user modules and elsewhere and syndicate its activities (blogs, articles, forums, etc.) via feeds.

The configuration of internal feeds (data Tiki provides for others to include into their site) is explained in this page, and the configuration of external feeds is explained in Feeds User.

Key Function and sub-features

Tiki has feeds for

• Articles
• Blog
• Directory
• File gallery
• Forum
• Image gallery
• Map
• Wiki pages
• Calendar
• tracker

You can find the feeds at the bottom bar (if it is switched on in admin menu):



You can click on any of those RSS icons () at the bottom of the page in order to get the syndicated content from that Tiki section. Copy that URL and paste it in your favourite feed aggregator, email program, web site (provided they support collecting RSS feeds).

Setting up feeds

Tiki is set up to generate feeds from Blog, Image galleries, File galleries, the Calendar, Articles, Forums... -and more. To turn on the feature click Admin so you get the page with the little icons and choose the RSS icon. "Enable" the features you want to feed to the world. Save it and a little RSS icon will appear for users on pages where a feed is available.

Keep in mind that "outgoing" feeds of your own Tiki blogs, calendar, image and file galleries and articles can also be displayed within your own Tiki!(See Below for instructions.) This is a handy way to summarize content from one part of your site in another. I use it for file downloads where I've set up a file gallery -but rather than send people to the gallery I stick an RSS feed in the page for that group so they don't have to leave the page to download the file. No doubt you'll find more ways to use this powerful feature.


Get your feed:
Go to the news site you you want to get a feed from. Click through to their RSS link. Copy the URL of the link from your browser.

Subscribe to an external feed
In Tiki, go to the Admin menu down the left side of your page (not the page with all the icons) and click on "External Feeds". Type a name for your feed (likely the name of the originating feed, say "New York Times") -this is so you can recognize it in the list you'll be making of all your feeds.

Enter a description if you like.

In the "url" box put the URL of the feed you copied in step one above.

Choose a "refresh rate": event calendar or news feeds might benefit from a fast refresh, - Blog maybe once a day -whatever floats your boat.

Click "show feed title" and "publish date" as these are handy pieces of info.

After you "Save" you'll see an external feeds list (with only one feed in it if this is your first one). This module tells Tiki where to pick up the feed (via the URL). Write down the "ID" number (likely "1" -again, if this is your first).



Here's the easy part: while editing any wiki page (or within any user module) stick this bit in to get your feed displaying:

{rss=1 max=5}

...where "1" is the feed ID and max=5 is the maximum number of feed items to display (I have no idea if there are limits to the max number but it's more than 5!)

Save your page and voila! You'll have a feed where you want it.

Note that there are actually 2 different feed options. See the docs for details

There is the RSS wiki plugin, which uses the format:

{RSS(id=>XXX,max=>YYY,date=>1,author=>1,desc=>1)}{RSS}

But there is also an RSS Smarty function, that uses a slightly different format:

{rss id=XXX, max=YYY date=1 author=1 desc=1}

To combine feeds, use the following syntax:

{rss id=1:2:3:4 max=yyy date=1 author=1 desc=1}

(This needs more explanation)

More information

See this video (below) for more information on feeds in general, or click on any of the links below for more information on feeds in Tiki:

• Feeds User
• RSS Admin
• RSS Feeds Details

Alias

• RSS

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