Newsagent/Feeds

Newsagent
Author	Chris Page
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Feeds

Newsagent publishes articles in Feeds, and every article needs to go into a feed (currently exactly one feed per article, in the future it may be possible to add an article to multiple feeds), even if it is just a few lines giving information to students. The list of feeds any given staff member has access to publish articles in is determined by their permissions in Newsagent. Determining which feeds a staff member should have access to is part of the account setup process, but if the staff member's needs change the list of feeds they can access can be changed at any time.

Feeds themselves are never 'pushed' out; they must be requested by clients who are interested in the contents of the Feed. Clients in this case may include the School Website, various satellite sites around the School, and even individuals running their own RSS aggregator/reader or showing the feed on their website. Feeds are completely public: anyone with the appropriate URL may request the contents of any feed they want to consume from anywhere in the world.

There are currently 19 feeds defined in the system, and feeds are added on an as-needed basis. If none of the existing feeds are appropriate for your articles, new ones can be added.

Visibility levels

Every article has a visibility level associated with it, and when a client requests a feed it can tell Newsagent which visibility level it is interested in seeing articles at. If a client doesn't explicitly request articles with specific visibility levels, it will be given articles of any visibility level that have been added to the requested feed. Essentially, the visibility level is a way for clients to filter the articles they see on a feed - if all they want is the Medium articles, they just ask for those.

The following Visibility levels are defined in the system, however some visibility levels may not be available for some staff members:

Important (School Home Page)

If you want your article to appear on the front page of the school website (plus anywhere else that explicitly or implicitly requests Important articles in your selected feed), enable this visibility level.

Medium (Section Leader Page)

If you want your article to appear on any apprpriate leader page on the school site (plus, again, anywhere else that requests Medium articles in your selected feed), enable the Medium visibility level.

General (Group or Internal pages)

If you don't want your article to appear on the school website (but it will be given to clients that request the General level of your selected feed), enable the General visibility level. This is the level you will generally select for 'internal' messages.

This is another way of saying that if you select Important, it does not mean that your article will appear in a feed if the client asks for articles with Medium or General visibility: if a client asks for articles with Medium visibility, but your article only has Important set, your article will not be included in the list of articles sent to the client. If you want it to, you need to select Important and Medium. Similarly, adding an article to a feed with the Medium visibility will not make it appear when a client asks for articles with General visibility, unless you also enable General visibility.

In practice

The School website is a good example of interaction with the system. On the home page there is a News block: the contents of that is generated from the result of the school website sending a request to Newsagent requesting articles posted with the Important level in any feed. On the Study leader page there is another news block, and that one is the result of the website asking Newsagent for all articles that have been published in the various Study feeds with the visibility level Medium. Similarly, the People leader page is asking Newsagent for all articles that have been published in the People feed at the Medium level.

At present, there are only two locations that syndicate any "General" level feeds: the Monday Mail and Masters Mail pages on the studentnet site show the contents of the corresponding feeds at the General level (actually, they show all levels, but they're the only place that show General ones too). Articles published in the other feeds at the General level are, therefore, not officially visible anywhere at present but this will change in future.