Beginner's Guide

NEWSFEEDS
Feeds are very handy. It is possible to subscribe to different kind of news and information.
Unfortunately even today, often people don't use them for some inexplicable reasons. Thirty years ago
you had to buy and read a newspaper to get to know the 'News'. Fifteen years ago you opened your
browser and visited one website after another to get to know the "News". Today, you can still do both but
it's also possible to use a feed aggregator. Google's reader
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and the dynamic bookmark toolbar of your
browser (e.g. Firefox) are quite popular. The Joomla Newsfeeds component is an aggregator as well. Not as
sophisticated like Google's reader, but also quite useful.
The news feed component allows you to collect feeds from other sites and publish it on your site.
In today's world of social media everyone probably has dozens of user accounts. Often videos and
images are stored on youtube.com and flickr.com. In a company, the situation is even more complex.
Imagine how much information is available as newsfeeds about a project like Joomla or about your
company.
A feed reader on our website
In the next example, we want to build a feed reader on our website. I'll try to collect all the bits and
pieces which are created around our company and list them in a table. We have a vimeo account for our
videos, a flickr account for images, several twitter accounts and that's still not all :-)
First, I create a newsfeeds category called cocoate in Components Newsfeeds Categories and
afterwards for every feed an entry in Components Newsfeeds Feeds (Figure 1). The single problem is
often finding the correct feedlink. For example, our vimeo video feed link looks like this: http://
vimeo.com/cocoate/videos/rss. The Flickr feed link of our photos looks more complicated (http://
api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id=17963290@N00&lang=en-us&format=rss_200).
In the publishing options you have to enter how many feed entries you want to show and the number
of seconds before the cache is refreshed. Joomla only stores the amount of items which you configured in
its cache. This is an important detail because in some countries it is not allowed to store the content from
a public newsfeed in your database.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide
Monday, 30 January 2012! Page 163
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http://www.google.com/reader