CMF Syndication Overview

What is Syndication?

At this point, we are only discussing out-bound services which are currently available in the CMF 1.x release. Syndication is the process by which a site is able to share information out to other sites. Like a news service syndicates news stories, subscribing to AP, a new service recieves new stories which they can publish or use in some manner building the content of their own news presentation without actually generating the content in-house. This concept is applied to the similar act of 'pushing content' to other sites who have an interest in brining the information into their site in some manner.

SyndicationTool Overview

The SyndicationTool allows for sitewide syndication of content in folders (or folder-like objects which support the synContentValues interface). Currently on the SyndicationTool the following features are present:

1. Enable/disable sitewide syndication.

2. Override the Syndicaiton module element defaults on the properties management form.

Once sitewide syndication has been enabled, the Syndication action on folders is enabled, allowing syndication for a specific folder to be enabled. This is to protect calling the RSS dtml method on folder contents one wishes to remain non-syndicated. A syndication_information object is set on the folder which acts as the 'propertysheet' for over-riding sitewide defaults for each particular syndication instance.

The DTML methods making up an RDF Syndication feed are found in skins/generic, they are:

• RSS.dtml
• itemRSS.dtml
• rssBody.dtml
• rssDisabled

This allows for complete skinning of the syndication to suit a site's requirements.