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README.txt

$Revision: 1.12.4.1 $

Copyright (c) 2002, 2004 Infrae. All rights reserved.
See also LICENSE.txt

Meta::

Valid for: Silva News 0.9
Authors: Guido Wesdorp, Martijn Faassen, Guido Goldstein
Emails: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]
CVS: $Revision: 1.12.4.1 $

Silva News

Silva is a Zope-based web application designed for the creation and
management of structured, textual content. Silva allows users to
enter new documents as well as edit existing documents using a web
interface.

Silva News is an extension to Silva to allow authors to place news-
and agendaitems on the Silva site and show them on a page. Silva
News is a Silva add-on which can be used on Silva versions 0.9.3 and
up.

There are versions for older Silva versions available for download
as well. No other products are required to use Silva News from
Silva, besides the products required to run Silva itself.

Installing Silva News

See INSTALL.txt

Using Silva News

The first thing to do is add subjects and target audiences to the
service_news object in the Silva root in the ZMI. This object is
used only to manage those lists (subjects and target audiences),
these will function as criteria for the newsfilters (more on these
later in this document) to search on. It would be best to add as
much subjects and target audiences as currently available to the
service when setting up News, since the lists are the basis of the
filtering system and one has to dive into the ZMI to add items
(therefore it requires appropriate rights to edit stuff in the ZMI).
Managing these lists is quite straightforward: you can add an item
by filling in a string into one of the textfields and pressing on
the corresponding 'add' button, and remove them by checking the
checkbox in front of an item and clicking the corresponding 'remove'
button.

Adding a News Publication

Newsitems can only be added to newsfolders. To add one, go to the
SMI and choose 'Silva News Publication' from the menu of addables
(upper right corner of the edit tab in folders, publications and
the Silva root). Enter an id and a title and choose 'Add and
edit', you will then be taken to the edit tab of the newsfolder.
This tab looks a lot like the edit tab of other containers
(folders, publications) in Silva, except it doesn't have a default
document or view and can not contain anything other then newsitems
and newsfolders (adding newsfolders to other newsfolders allows
for a more structured setup of the newsfolder).You can add
newsitems by choosing a specific type from the addables menu in
this tab.

Metadata tab

On the metadata tab of newsfolders there is a checkbox called
'restrict access'. When this is checked, the folder can only be
found by news- and agendafilters in the same folder the folder is
on and each subfolder of that folder. This can be used to make the
newsfolder 'private', making it available only to for example 1
department.

Adding news items

Now authors can add newsitems. As stated before, there are two
types of newsitems: plain newsitems and agendaitems. The main
differences are that agendaitems must contain a date/time on which
the event described in them takes place, and contain a location on
which the event takes place. The start date/time is necessary to
show the items in agendaviewers, since they show the items for a
particular period (e.g. a month). Therefore agendaviewers can show
only agendaitems. Newsviewers are capable of showing both news-
and agendaitems. Other datafields required for the system to work
correctly are 'subjects' and 'target audiences', which the author
can use to classify the newsitem. These fields will later be used
by the newsfilters as criteria for routing the items to
newsviewers. When editing a news or agenda item, keep in mind that
the first heading placed in the content editor is considered to be
the subheader of the newsitem, and the first paragraph as the lead
(both will show up in the previes on the viewers).

Adding news filters

The next thing to do to make the system work is adding one or more
news- and agendafilters. These are objects used by editors or
chief- editors to filter a stream of newsitems. The items can be
filtered on subject and target audience (so for instance a
newsfilter can route only newsitems with a specific subject or
meant for a specific target audience to the viewers) and/or as
individual newsitems.

The Publication's tab

The edit tab of a newsfilter (called 'Sources' instead of 'Edit')
shows a list of all available newsfolders (excluding the one made
private by checking the 'restrict access' checkbox that are not in
the same folder or a parentfolder of the newsfilter). To route
newsitems of a newsfolder to newsviewers (more about those later)
make sure the checkbox in front of the newsfolder is checked and
click the 'update folders' button. All (published) newsitems that
conform to the criteria of the newsfilter will then be routed to
the newsviewers that use this filter. These criteria can be set in
the 'Metadata' tab of the newsfilter: you see the lists of
subjects and target audiences of service_news again, and in
newsfilters also a couple of radiobuttons to select whether the
filter should route agendaitems as well as newsitems. These
criteria can be used to distribute news- and agendaitems in
different ways across the Silva instance to newsviewers.

For example: a number of different newsfolders can now contain
both news- and agendaitems of different subjects and targeting
different audiences, and the newsfilters filter and distribute
specific items to viewers. Please note that this means that
filters must be sensibly set up for the site to allow all
newsitems to be shown somewhere: it is very easy to set up the
system in a way that news- and agendaitems with a specific subject
or target audience are filtered out by all newsfilters, and
therefore be excluded from all viewers.

The Items tab

The 'Items' tab can be used to filter out specific items, to allow
editors and chiefeditors to disallow specific news- and
agendaitems to be routed by a filter. To filter out a specific
item, uncheck the checkbox in front of it and choose 'update'.

Now the news- and agendaviewers can be placed. The viewers are the
objects responsible for showing the news- and agendaitems to the
public. An author can place viewers where he wants news to be shown.
The viewers show a list of items routed by the filters.

The Viewer's Edit tab

The viewers are quite easy to set up: the only tab that matters is
the first one (edit), where you can set the number of days the
viewer will look back (for newsviewers) or ahead (for
agendaviewers) to get items. In the case of newsviewers there is
also a switch to choose a number of items to be shown. Also there
is a list of available filters. All filters chosen here are used
for retrieving news. When placed, the viewers will be available to
the public and show news- and/or agendaitems, together with an
archive (that allows showing items for a particular month) and a
search option.

Appending /rss to the URL of a NewsViewer will show the RSS 1.0
(RDF compliant) view of the items in this viewer.

The RSSAggregator

The RSSAggregator replaces the old (and now removed) RSSViewer. In
the tab_edit you'll see a textbox called 'RSS feeds' where you can
enter the complete URLs for the feeds you want to have merged by
this aggregator instance.

All the other functionality is the same as for News Viewers.

License

Silva News is released under the BSD license. See 'LICENSE.txt'.