collective.portlet.feedmixer 1.0

Portlet which can show multiple feeds

Introduction

collective.portlet.feedmixer is a portlet for Plone 3 which can show one or multiple content feeds.

Feedmixer uses feedparser to process feeds which allows it to support RSS 0.90, Netscape RSS 0.91, Userland RSS 0.91, RSS 0.92, RSS 0.93, RSS 0.94, RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, Atom 0.3, Atom 1.0, and CDF feeds

Installing

This package requires Plone 3.0 or later and feedparser.

Installing without buildout

First install feedparser. You can install this in either the system python path or in the lib/python directory of your Zope instance. If you have setuptools installed you can do this using easy_install:

easy_install FeedParser

If you do not have setuptools you can install it manually using the setup.py script in the feedparser source. If you want to install feedparser inside your Zope instance instead of system wide you can its ‘’–prefix=’’ option to install in the ‘’lib/python’’ directory of your Zope instance.

Next you need to install this package. This can also be done by installing it in either your system path packages or in the lib/python directory of your Zope instance. As with feedparser you can do this using either easy_install or via the setup.py script.

After installing the package it needs to be registered in your Zope instance. This can be done by putting a collective.portlet.feedmixer-configure.zcml file in the etc/pakage-includes directory with this content:

<include package="collective.portlet.feedmixer" />

or, alternatively, you can add that line to the configure.zcml in a package or Product that is already registered.

Installing with buildout

If you are using buildout to manage your instance installing collective.portlet.feedmixer is even simpler. You can install it by adding it to the eggs line for your instance:

[instance]
eggs = collective.portlet.feedmixer
zcml = collective.portlet.feedmixer

The last line tells buildout to generate a zcml snippet that tells Zope to configure collective.portlet.feedmixer.

If another package depends on the feedmixer egg or includes its zcml directly you do not need to specify anything in the buildout configuration: buildout will detect this automatically.

After updating the configuration you need to run the ‘’bin/buildout’’, which will take care of updating your system.

Using the portlet

In order to use the feedmixer portlet you will first need to install the feedmixer product in your site. This is done through the standard ‘’Add-on products’’ control panel in the Plone site setup. After this has been done a new ‘’Feed Mixer’ portlet type will be available.

Feedmixer portlets have several configurable options:

Portlet Title

This will be used as the title of the portlet.

Maximum time to cache feed data

This determins how long feeds can be cached before feedmixer will attempt to refresh the feed data. In order to reduce the load on other servers it is advisable to set this to a reasonably large value.

Number of items to display

How many items to show in the portlet.

URL(s) for all feeds

A list of URLs for all feeds. All standard RSS and Atom feeds are supported as well as CDF feeds.

Performance

The portlet tries to be very friendly and will only reload a feed if required. It does this in several different ways.

All feeds are stored in a shared cache as defined in plone.memoize. This defaults to being a Zope RAMCache but you can choose different caches by registering a different ‘’ICacheChooser’’ utility. The cache key used is ‘’collective.portlet.feedmixer.FeedCache’’. For example for deployments with multiple Zope instances you can use a memcached based cache which will allow you to share downloaded feeds amongst all Zope instances.

If a feed entry has expired in the cache it needs to be reloaded. However the feedmixer portlet will try to use both ETAGs and HTTP Last-Modified headers to check if the feed has been updated since the last time it was downloaded. If it has not been updated the timeout for the cached feed will be updated and continue to be used.

Copyright and credits

collective.portlet.feedmixer is copyright 2007 by Jarn (formerly known as Plone Solutions).

It was written by Wichert Akkerman.

Changelog

Release 1.0

• Initial release.