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DNN Blog
Mar
29
Posted by:
Josh McWilliam
3/29/2006
Hello everyone. I just wanted to introduce myself in this first Blog entry and say that I am very excited to begin contributing to DNN as the new News Module Team Lead. We are in the planning phases right now, but here is a sneak peak at some of the high level ideas we are talking about adding in the next phase of this project.
- Display
- Show one or more news feeds displayed as a single, merged feed
- Ability to define how often an individual feed is updated
- Ability to activate / de-activate an individual feed
- Ability to customize how the news feed data is displayed on the screen per individual news feed
- XSLT templating
- HTML / Token templating
- Pre-defined default templates to select from
- Ability to determine sort order
- Feed Name
- Feed Title
- Published Date
- Ability to enable / disable HTML escaping in feed description
- Publish
- Ability to show list of feeds that are available for syndication.
- Ability to enable / disable an aggregate of feeds to be re-syndicated.
- Caching
- Ability to cache feeds at the host level.
- Ability for an individual display instance of the news feeds to determine the update frequency.
- Ability to cache aggregated feeds for re-syndication via files to prevent load on database
- Security
- Ability to request secured news feeds
- Ability to syndicate news feeds securely
- Ability to encrypt / decrypt usernames and passwords in requests.
Please note that these are currently IDEAS, NOT GARAUNTEED REQUIREMENTS at this point. Please do comment though as we would like your feedback on how we can best improve this module. Ideas and comments would probably be best added to the project forum, as a forum lends itself better to discussion.
Thanks,
-josh.
4 comment(s) so far...
Re: DNN News Module Project
Hi Josh!
This is a great project that you're working on. I've got one additional feature that you might consider adding. It would probably be worthwhile to consider using a "Convert HTML to regular expressions" type of formula for screen-scraping headlines as well. It would add flexibility to your ability to consume different data formats -- rather than just being restricted to RSS, Atom, etc.
As one example that's been invaluable to me, I use a newsreader called Desktop Sidebar (http://www.desktopsidebar.com/) which uses this type of technique to screenscrape the Microsoft Download site, sort by Release Date for me and then return to me the title of each newly released download. The formula that I've created is as follows:
" regex="]+)>([^<]+) ([^<]+)([^<]+) " title="\2" link="http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/\1"/>
It's a little cryptic, but Desktop Sidebar provides a nice little UI to dynamically build this formula based on selecting a sample headline. This particular aggregator is a windows application and not an asp.net application, so I'm including a few links to articles (some pretty old), which demonstrate some vary similar functionality -- and may possibly give you some ideas for building your DNN News module upon.
As a quick demo, here's the link to a live demo of a News Aggregator page with source-code included. It doesn't do near as much as your looking to do, but it could help give you a quick win by getting a first revision out the door. I absolutely KNOW that the News module that you're proposing will become a staple Add-on in everybody's DNN sites.
http://aspnet.4guysfromrolla.com/demos/ConsumeRSS.aspx
Best of Luck!
Rob Kszan
rkszan@crmsource.com_nospam
Creating an Online RSS News Aggregator with ASP.NET
http://msdn.microsoft.com/asp.net/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dnaspp/html/aspnet-createrssw-aspnet.asp
Consuming an RSS Feed with ASP.NET
http://aspnet.4guysfromrolla.com/articles/031903-1.aspx
By robertkszan on
4/3/2006
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Re: DNN News Module Project
"
" regex="]+)>([^<]+) ([^<]+)([^<]+) " title="\2" link="http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/\1"/>
"
By robertkszan on
4/3/2006
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Re: DNN News Module Project
Hi Josh,
Sorry, this "Add Comment" box doesn't seem to let me insert the Regular Expression code that I have from Desktop Sidebar. Please email me at rkszan@crmsource.com_nospam (without the _nospam) and I can send this to you if it helps.
Cheers,
Rob
By robertkszan on
4/3/2006
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Re: DNN News Module Project
Rob, thanks for the comment! I agree, this does sounds like great functionality we should add. I have added it to our PM system so it doesn't get lost and we can incorporate it in a future version (http://support.dotnetnuke.com/Default.aspx?p=17&i=2777). I don't forsee it getting in there this initial release, but I can definitely see it shortly thereafter. Thanks.
By jmcwilliam on
4/7/2006
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