RSS is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works such as blog entries and news articles. RSS allows users to stay up-to-date with your site’s content without actually having to visit your site! Instead, they can subscribe to your site’s RSS feed with an RSS feed reader. Their RSS reader reads your site’s RSS feed and displays information about all the web content that’s published on your site, such as each article’s title and publication date. If one of your site’s web content articles grabs their attention, then they can follow their RSS reader’s link to the article’s full content on your site. Many RSS readers are available today, including web-based readers, ones for the Windows, Mac, and Linux platforms, and ones for mobile devices. You’ll see how to create RSS feeds in Liferay DXP next.
Configuring RSS Feeds
To manage a Liferay site’s RSS feeds, navigate to the Site Administration →
Content page of your site and click Web Content. Site administrators can use
this Web Content menu option to manage their site’s web content, including web
content structures and templates, which you learned in the
Creating Web Content
section. Site administrators can also use this option to manage their site’s RSS
feeds. Click the Options icon ()
at the top right of your screen and then Feeds if you’d like to add, edit, or
delete RSS feeds.
Figure 1: Clicking *Options* → *Feeds* from the Site Administration's Web Content option opens a popup window which displays your site's RSS feeds. You can add or edit RSS feeds, configure their permissions, or delete them.
Click the Add Feed button to add a new feed. You need to enter a name, select a target page, and select a web content structure for the feed. A feed’s target page serves two purposes:
-
The site to which the target page belongs determines which web content articles appear in the feed. For example, if the target page belongs to the Marketing site, only web content articles belonging to the Marketing site will appear in the feed.
-
The target page is the page where “orphaned” web content articles will be displayed. Orphaned web content articles are articles that have been published in your site but have not been configured to be displayed in specific Web Content Display applications. Liferay RSS feeds can provide links to any published web content articles, both orphaned articles and articles that have been configured to be displayed in specific Web Content Display applications. For articles that have been configured to be displayed in a specific application, the RSS feeds’ links point to the Liferay page of that app. For orphaned articles, the RSS feeds’ links point to the feed’s target page. When users click on such links for orphaned articles, the full content of the orphaned article is displayed on the target page.
Figure 2: To create a new RSS feed, you only need to specify a name, target page, and web content structure. Of course, you can also configure other features of the feed such as its permissions, web content constraints, and presentation settings.
To specify a target page, you need to enter the target page’s friendly URL. Note
that friendly URLs do not include the host name. For example, the friendly URL
of a public page called Welcome belonging to a site called Marketing might
look like this: /web/marketing/welcome. Optionally, you can specify a target
portlet ID. This would be the portlet ID of a Web Content Display application on
the target page in which orphaned web content should be displayed. The
application must exist or else the content will not displayed. The URL field
contains the address of your RSS feed. It appears after you’ve actually created
the feed by clicking Save.
The final two sections of the Add Feed form allow you customize which web content articles appear in your feed.
-
The Web Content Constraints section allows you to select a web content structure with which to filter the articles that appear in your feed. This is useful since all web content articles are created using web content structures.
-
The Presentation Settings section allows you to customize additional details about your feed and how articles are displayed in your feed. Leave the Feed Item Content set to Web Content Description if you’d just like a description of each article to appear in your feed. Set it to Rendered Web Content: Use Default Template if you’d like the full content of each article to appear in the feed. Customizing the Feed Type allows you to choose which web feed language to use for your feed. You can choose Atom 1.0 (the default), RSS 1.0, or RSS 2.0. Customize the Maximum Items to Display to choose the maximum number of articles should appear in your feed at one time. Leave the Order By Column set to Modified Date to have articles arranged in order from the last time they were published or modified. You can set the Order by Column to Display Date if you want to have articles arranged in order from the time they were configured to be displayed in a specific Web Content Display application. Lastly, you can leave the Order by Type set to Ascending to have the oldest articles at the top of the feed or you can set it to Descending to have the newest articles at the top of the feed.
When you’re done configuring your RSS feed, click Save to create your feed.
Once one or more feeds have been created, they’ll appear in a list in the Feeds popup window when you click Options → Feeds. You can edit existing feeds using the same form used for creating them. The main difference is that when you edit an existing feed, the URL field is populated. Copy this URL into a new browser tab or window to test your feed. From the Feeds popup window, you can also customize the permissions of feeds or delete feeds.
It’s possible to completely disable RSS feeds at the instance level. You can do
this by setting the rss.feeds.enabled property to false in your
portal-ext.properties file. By default, it’s set to true. If you keep the
default, RSS enabled, you can make several other RSS property customizations.
Please refer to the
RSS section
of your portal.properties file for details.
Using the RSS Publisher Application
The RSS Publisher application lets you display any number of RSS feeds and configure how they are displayed. If you’re looking for a web-based RSS reader, look no further: just add the RSS Publisher app to one your personal site’s private pages, and voila! You have your own personal RSS reader. Open the application’s Configuration menu to select the feeds to be displayed and customize the display. The RSS Publisher app can also be placed on sites’ public or private pages to make feeds available to guests or site members, respectively. In these cases, make sure that only site administrators have permission to customize the RSS application and select feeds to be displayed.
Once you’ve added the RSS Publisher app to a page, open the application’s
Configuration menu by clicking on the Options icon
() at the top right corner of the
application and selecting Configuration.
Figure 3: The RSS Publisher app's configuration window lets you choose feeds to be displayed and allows you to customize the display settings.
By default, the RSS application displays one feed. In the Feeds section, click on the plus sign to add a new feed or on the minus sign to remove a feed. Enter the URL of the RSS feed to display into the URL field. If you leave the Title field blank, the feed’s title appears in the RSS application. If you enter a custom title into the Title field, the custom title appears instead of the feed’s title.
In the top section, use the following selector buttons to select the feed details that should be displayed:
- Show Feed Title
- Show Feed Published Date
- Show Feed Description
- Show Feed Image
- Show Feed Item Author
You can also select the number of entries and expanded entries that should be displayed per feed. Expanded entries show more of an article’s actual content than regular entries. By default, each feed shows four entries per feed and eight expanded entries per feed. You can set the feed image alignment to control whether feed images appear to the right or left of the text. By default, the feed image alignment is set to Right.
Figure 4: By default, the RSS Publisher app is configured to display feeds from the Financial Time. This image displays what the Financial Times feed looks like in the RSS Publisher app.
You’ve learned how to create, manage, and use RSS feeds. Great job!
In this chapter, you explored Liferay DXP’s asset framework. Any type of content in Liferay is considered an asset and can utilize the features provided by the asset framework: tags, categories, comments, ratings, and relationships. You examined the Asset Publisher application and looked at the many configuration options for choosing what kinds of assets to display and how to display them. You saw that the Asset Publisher application is designed to integrate with the Tags Navigation and Categories navigation applications to allow users to browse content more easily. You also learned about the Display Page attribute of web content, the Content Display Page page template, and canonical URLs for assets. Assets can have display page associated with them so that the full view of the asset is displayed on the display page. The display page of an asset is used in the asset’s canonical URL.