readme.txt

File contents

<b>NewsCenter</b>

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.
	
<b>Current Status:</b>
- 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

<b>Requirements:</b>
	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/

<b>Usage</b>: 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:
<dtml-let x="NewsCenterObject.get_channel(cid='CHANNEL_ID')">
<dtml-with x>
<dtml-var "x.slashdot_view(_.None, _)"> 
</dtml-with>
</dtml-let>

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 <[email protected]>

	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