Webfeeds

Owned by Blair McKenzie
Last updated: Oct 19, 2010 by Geoff BowersVersion comment
3 min read

This approach has been deprecated in FarCry 6.x.x and above. Do not use this approach for modern applications. You should be using a type webskin for the relevant content type instead; see Sample RSS Feed

Introduction

Part of the improved features in FarCry 5.0 is the web feed functionality. This page covers setting up and modifying that functionality.

Managing Web Feeds as a content type in FarCry allows us to do a few useful things and provide a lot of functionality out of the box:

  • The default view on a web feed is an HTML view of the feeds information. This page includes the standard RSS and Atom feeds in the head, links to the feeds in the page itself, and an HTML listing of the content.
  • A web feed can be setup for any content type in the application, and the title and content of the feed items can be configured to grab any property.
  • Its easy to update the static XML files regularly by creating a scheduled task.
  • The items in a web feed can be filtered by category.
  • Podcasts and vidcasts are just as easy to set up as normal web feeds.

For developers there are some extra advantages:

  • The way web feeds are generated can be overridden in a plugin or the project.
  • There is no extra work when developing content types, as web feeds automatically work on every content type.

Creating a web feed

Here are some examples of web feeds.

News Feed

1. Go to the Content->Content Publishing->Content Export->Web Feeds in the webtop

2. Click add, and enter the basic information (title and content type) about your web feed


3. Have an icon for your feed? Upload them.

RSS icon:

On the atom step, upload the Atom version of the icon:

4. Update the author name and email address

5. Now to configure which properties of News to use in the feed. On the Media step confirm that "Title" is selected for the Title property, and select "Body Content" as HTML Content property.

6. Click complete. You have now created a News web feed. Select View to see the HTML page. Notice how you can subscribe to the feed by clicking on the links in page, or on your browser's native RSS subscription link.


7. Close the HTML view. It is possible to subscribe to the web feed the way it is, but at the moment it will be generated every time a feed reader requests an update. It is much more effective to provide a static XML file. On the Web Feed overfiew page, click on Create Task link for your feed.

8. Notice that the options are different now. A scheduled task has been created that will update the XML files for this web feed at this time every day. You can change the time and frequence of the updates by editing the task.