NewsCenter NewsCenter is a Zope/XML application that aims to be a resouce for Zope sites to allow their users access to the latest headlines from around the world on many different topics. It would like to bring order to this mass of information by making it searchable and displayed in a format that is easy to navigate and also allow users to have email syndication of channels that they are interested in. NewsCenter's news acquisition is based on the import of aggregate channel listings in a variety of xml formats. NewsCenter was designed for site managers to individually publish channels contained within a channel list. Furthermore because of performance considerations when importing a large number of channels or a large channel list it has options for the xml files to be loaded from the file system as opposed to the default implementation which obtains them directly from the web. Current Status: - I've realized that Zope sites tend to keep user info in a variety of formats, rather reduplicating that info within NewsCenter, I've implemented a hook get_syndicated_content(channel_ids, lastdate=None) which will retrieve all the items of a channel that are newer than lastdate. if lastdate is none it retrieves all items from the last 24 hrs. this hook can be used to build syndicated content in the form of user pages and emails. - NewsCenter supports aggregate channels in the ocs format. - NewsCenter support searching of channels. - NewsCenter supports channels in the RSS format version (0.9-1.0) - i've imported over 1965 channels using ocs files from http://www.xmltree.org http://www.xmltree.com/export/ocs.cfm and http://www.moreover.com http://www.moreover.com/categories/ocs/ocsdirectory.rdf - for more information see CHANGES.txt for an idea of the future direction of NewsChannel read the TODO.txt Requirements: NewsCenter requires the following to be installed on the system prior to its installation -Shane Hathaway's BTreeFolder -The PyXML package links to downloads: http://www.zope.org/Members/hathawsh/BTreeFolder/ http://www.python.org/sigs/xml-sig/files/ Usage: Through the management screen click the configure to tab to adjust the settings as you prefer. at this time the filesys updating has not been tested and it will likely not work. the major setting to adjust is whether you want to publish the rss channels recieved from the channel list immediately or to wait until you review them. if you publish them immeadiately they will be retrieved from the url, if you're importing a large number of channels this means that you will be consuming network resources for a while. I recommend leaving the default settings as is for initial installation. to add some channels, click on the channels tab of the management screen to and add the url of an ocs file. with the default settings this file will be retrieved and parsed for channels. to publish these channels click on the view unpublished channels link and select the channels you wish to publish. these channels will have their files retrieved and parsed and then will be publicly visible. to link a channel to a separate page you can use the accessor methods of NewsCenter and pick a format. current formats are full page html - method index_html and slasbox format - method slashbox_view example: you can get a list of channels with get_channels(cids=[LIST OF CHANNEL IDS]) License: LGPL copies of the LGPL are distributed with the product Install: - read Install Hacking: - read Hacking Credits: Author: Kapil Thangavelu This Product couldn't have been built without the work of others Thanks to Shane Hathaway for the BTreeFolder and Amos L. for XMLDocument and RSSChannel