Working With Mambo
RSS NewsFeeds
Mambo supports use of RSS NewsFeeds on your site. You can make available other
RSS feeds and also allow your site to be available via RSS feed. We will show
you how to do both here.
Setting Up Your Site's RSS Feed
To set up your RSS feed for your site so that others can display your news on
their sites or RSS reader, go to Components -> Syndicate.
You can then edit the following:
Cache: Usually set to 'yes' so you can store the feed files and serve them to
the other RSS readers that request them. This is preferred. Otherwise, your RSS
feed will be served to RSS readers 'live', which can take more time and processing
power on the server.
Cache Time: This is how many seconds that the site should refresh the cache. Note
that this is also a bit dependant on who accesses your site and when, since a php
script can not run unless someone visits or accesses the script.
Number of your site's news items to display in the RSS reader or feed. An RSS
news reader or site's RSS feed script may override this setting, but no more
that this many items will be displayed, no matter what the other readers request.
For example, if you set this at 10, and a reader requests only 5 items, then only
5 items would be displayed in the reader. However, if the reader requests 15 items,
only 10 items from your site's news will be displayed.
Title: Type in the title of your site.
Description: Type in the description of your site.
Image: You can select a small, 88 x 37 image which will be displayed when someone
views your RSS feed in some readers that support additional images. Note that the
image you want to use must be uploaded to your Mambo /images/M_images/ directory
before you enter the Components -> Syndicate
page to set up your feed. You can also select not to use an image at all.
Image Alt: If you decide to use an image, you should also type in some alternate
text that is shown if the image can not be shown in an RSS reader.
Limit Text and Text Length: This limits how much of the news article text is
shown in an RSS reader under the article title. Or if you wish, you can display
the entire text of a news item selecting 'no' for Limit Text. The
Text Length is the number of words to show in the RSS feed under
the title. Use 0 to not show any additional text under the title, and only just
the title itself. Note that some RSS readers still may be set up to display just
titles and no text, or further limit article text displayed.
Order: You can set this to order the items exactly as you have it on your
Front Page, or sort your news items in other ways, when displayed in an
RSS reader. Note that this sort order may be overridden by the RSS reader settings
in some cases.
Live Bookmarks: The Firefox Browser supports reading RSS feeds, and can bookmark
feeds in what is known as a Live Bookmark. You can add support for this
by selecting one of the options from this drop-down box. It's best to select the
lowest version, normally, so that people with earlier browser versions still will
be able to see the feed. However, you can select later versions. Just be sure
that what you select will be compatible with the most browsers. Anything from
RSS 0.91 to RSS 2.0 should be sufficient. Support for ATOM 0.3 is also included.
Type in a filename that will be used on the visitor's computer to hold the RSS
feeds. This could be your domain name without any dots, or whatever you choose.
Keep in mind it should be a filename that is useable in most Operating Systems.
YourDomainCom.bmk is a good choice (replacing YourDomainCom with your domain name).
When done, click the Save icon at the top of the page.
Go to Modules -> Site Modules and see to it that
the module called Syndicate is Published (showing an icon with a
green checkmark). Click on the red 'x' if there is one in the Published
column. If you go to your site's home page, you should see on your site a box
called Syndicate. These are the links people will use in their RSS feed
readers and site RSS feed scripts.
Bringing In Outside RSS Feeds To Your Site
You can also display outside RSS feed links on your site in an organized manor.
They will appear in the News Feeds menu item in your site's Main Menu.
To add news feeds, you first must create one or more categories to put them in.
Then you can add feeds to the new categories.
Adding A News Feed Category:
Go to Components -> News Feeds -> Manage Categories.
Mambo comes with a few categories for you to choose from. You can unpublish any
of them so that they do not show up on your site. And you can examine any of
them by clicking on a title. You can also delete categories by following the
instructions for Deleting News Feeds.
Click on the New icon at the top of the page. Fill in the Category Title
and name. Usually you may want these to be the same. This is what shows up in
the Category manager list and on your web site. There is no Section for News Feed
categories.
You can select a small image to display by the news feed. You must first upload
any such images to your Mambo /images/stories/ directory before you go to
the Category Manager page. Then select whether you want to Position the
image on the left or right of the feed category information.
You will not be able to change the Ordering until after you create the
news feed. From there you'll have to go back and Edit the feed information
further if you wish to change the ordering from default.
Choose an Access Level to control who may see this area of your site and
access the external news feeds that are placed in this category.
Usually you want to select 'yes' for Published.
Type in a short description for this category which the feeds will be placed in.
Click the Save icon at the top of the page when done.
Adding A News Feed
Go to Components -> News Feeds -> Manage Feeds. You
may see a number of them are already there as examples for you to look at. Just
click on any title to see how a feed is constructed. If you wish, you can unpublish
or delete feeds by clicking on the box next to the feed title, then clicking the
Delete or Unpublish icon at the top of the page. Note that to delete
a news feed category, you need to delete the feeds from it in here first.
To add a new feed, click the New icon at the top of the page.
Type in the name of the Feed.
Select the category to place it in from the drop down box.
Go to the site that has the RSS feed available. Look for a link or icon that says
RSS, XML, or ATOM. Right click on the link or image and
choose "Copy Link Location" or similar way to copy the URL from your web browser
to your clip board. Paste this link in to the Link text box.
Determine how many articles to display on your site from this feed.
The Cashe Time will determine how many seconds to wait before refreshing the list
of items from that feed. Keep in mind this is also dependant on how many people
view this feed from your site.
Ordering will need to be changed by going back and editing this feed once you
have already saved it.
Select 'yes' for Published (default).
Click the Save icon at the top of the page when done.
Be sure that the News Feeds menu item is displayed in your site's main
menu. To be sure of this, go to
Menu -> mainmenu. Look for the News Feeds
item and be sure there is an icon with a green checkmark in that item's
Published column. If there is not, click on the red 'x' in that column to
add it to the menu.
Editing A Category or Feed
To edit a category, go to Components -> News Feeds -> Manage Categories,
then click on the name of the category you wish to edit or make changes to.
To edit a news feed item, go to Components -> News Feeds -> Manage News Feeds,
then click on the name of the news feed you wish to edit or make changes to.
Deleting A Category or Feed
Note that in order to delete a category, you must delete the feeds contained in
that category first. Go to
Components -> News Feeds -> Manage News Feeds and
click on the box next to feed titles that are in the category you wish to delete,
then click on the Delete icon at the top of the page. Or you can click on
any feed title and edit it to change which category it will be in, instead of
the category you are about to delete.
To delete a category, go to
Components -> News Feeds -> Manage Categories and
click on the box next to the title of one or more categories you wish to delete.
Then click on the Delete icon at the top of the page.
Note that you can also Unpublish a category or news feed. This is done with
the Unpublish icon at the top of the page. This will cause the feeds within
the unpublished category (along with the category) to not show up on your site.
Unpublished individual feeds will not be displayed on your site. Note that if you
can not simply unpublish feeds that are in a category you're about to delete. You
still must either delete or move the feeds to another category before deleting
the category the feeds were originally in.
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