Due to the nature of GWP’s involvement we listen to many different news channels. WE also have many different website that we may wish to synchronise with but may be run on a different platform or an entirely different team or organisation.
To get around this problem the website allows you to feed both RSS 2.0 and Atom feeds into it. As the RSS feeds are received they are stacked up for approval by the administrator so that a constant check can be made and an automatic ear out to the activities in the water world and our partner organisations.
To set up an RSS feed you first need a place to put them. You should find an area preprepared for you by the GWPO admin under:
Root folder -> All Rss Feeds
It should be named "For (your site name) Website"
The website allows you to feed several sources into one "RSS Container", for example you may have several technical water websites that you "listen" to. All of these can be added to one Container to make it easier for you to share all these feeds as one aggregated list.
To connect to a new RSS Container for one or more feeds, right click on your "For..." folder and "create new" then choose "RSS Container".
Name the container something suitable, remembering that it should be possible to use it for mutiple feeds as time goes on, (and that you may even choose to use different sourses all together in the future).
To add a feed, you must first have the URL. Find a website’s RSS feed, it should be RSS 2.0 or Atom. If the target website doesn’t supply a compatible feed use Google Reade to process the feed for you: log into the gwplive account on google and add a new subscription to the website in Google Reader (look at the details of this new subscription and you will see the URL to they auto generated Google reader RSS feed for that website).
Edit the target RSS Container and click on "Add Link" next to "Feeds" to enter the URL. Enter the URL in the popup windows and click OK and Save and Publish.
Monitoring your feeds
By default feeds are only published when you approve an article . If, however you trust the feed and do not need to authorise it (ex. your facebook wall feed, or flikr) you can set it to "auto publish". To do this, open the RSS Container in the EpiServer navigation, and right click on the feed URL, and select "Edit". Then, under the Edit tab, check the Auto Publish check box then Save and Publish.
You must monitor your feeds, and ensure that only those articles you wish to see appear.
Your feeds will appear under the RSS Container. To see the feeds arrive, click on the RSS Container. You will see a list of your atricles. Check the boxes of those you wish to show and click on "Save". To manually force the lsit to refresh (if for example an RSS Container hasn't been updated for a long time, this may be neccessary), hit "Refresh" and the page will re-load with all the new articles.
Managing RSS Feeds
There are two types of feed: trusted and untrusted. Untrusted feds must be approved by a moderator before they show. Trusted feeds will publish themselves automatically as they come into the system over time.
A moderator can chose to mange feeds in either mode, and even mix the two together. When an RSS Container has been created and the links for the container published, the moderator can edit each individual feed and choose whether to “trust” the feed or not. In most cases it is wise not to trust a feed unless you are picking it up and moderating it from Google Reader, which is another good method to collect and moderate feeds.
Approving articles
To approve an article to show on the website in an untrusted feed (note Auto-publish is off by default on all new feeds) open the parent RSS Container and you will see a list of articles by approved / not approved and date. Approved (checked) articles will appear first in the list. check the box next to the article you wish to display and click on Save.
If you have just created the RSS Container, it may be empty. To refresh a collection of feeds, click on the “update feeds” button. This may take a few minutes, depending on the amount of information the website had ot download.
Note: Unapproved articles are automatically removed from RSS feed lists after two weeks.
Auto-publishing of trusted feeds
Trusted sources, for example feeds from the GWP Toolbox website can be set to Auto-publish. Click on the individual feed, under the parent container, Edit->Content->Auto publish (check)->Save and Publish.
The maximum number of RSS feed articles showing on a page is limited in two ways, which is why the confusion can set in. It is however very practical to have both of these limits available to an author. The first limit is set on the feed itself and tells EpiServer how many articles to store and make available to the site.This can be any number but it is not recommended, for performance, to have anything larger than 20 or so for the Max Count value:
The next limit is set on the displaying page itself by the right hand module that lists out the RSS feeds, manual links and pushes:
It is recommended to set the RSS feed to a large but reasonable maximum (think how many feed articles one would ever feasibly want to show on the site, you can leave the maximum number empty if you want) and use the page’s module maximum limit to reduce this list to a length that works for the page itself.
Older unpublished RSS feeds are disappearing from my select list
Feed articles that have not been selected that are older than two weeks are automatically removed from the system to save space.
Changes to the Right Hand Modules, links etc. are not saved
Don’t rush, the module updates the database when you edit items. Try to make sure you let the
Make sure you hit “select” after making your changes