Tuchka.Dnn.Announcements-Syndication

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Tuchka.Dnn.AnnouncementSyndication

This is quite surprising that such a professional CMS as DotNetNuke has such weak modules packaged with it, as Announcements.

No, in general built in DotNetNuke Announcements module is ok, does its job to add / edit the announcements themselves, but nothing else, nothing fancy - no twitter cross-posts, and its Rss syndication abilities are quite poor:

to update an announcement in Rss you need to adjust the Published Date so that it is re-crawled (or other ways kick it in as it will not be re-crawled automatically)
html tags are removed, making rss entry appear ugly
no way to define rss entry layout
urls in rss announcement point to the announcement page itself rather than to the page the announcement is about.
rss feed title / description are predefined and are not changeable
rss feed url is uncontrolled

To address the above, the Tuchka.Dnn.AnnouncementSyndication module is created. It might still not be covering all the use cases, but does its job for this website, you can see it in action at this page:

Announcement module at http://www.tuchka.info/news.aspx
Rss module at http://www.tuchka.info/news/rss_feed.aspx

To use the module, follow these steps:

Download module
Install module
Add DNN Announcement module to be syndicated (on any page you like), you can also use existing announcement module
Create a new page for the Tuchka.Dnn.AnnouncementSyndication module (this is needed to let control the path)
Add the Tuchka.Dnn.AnnouncementSyndication module to the new page
Configure the module, linking it to the Announcements module
Done. Now anyone hitting the page created at step #4 will get an Rss

One interesting point is that since the module takes over the page and generates Rss instead of regular page, in order to reconfigure it in the future you will need to switch your DNN view to 'Layout View'.

Tuchka.Dnn.AnnouncementSyndication 1.0.x is compatible with DotNetNuke v 5.4.4 and Announcements v 4.0.3. It might work with other versions, but was not tested under them. Please contact www.tuchka.info through the Forum or Feedback if you experience issues under some other versions.

WARNING: AnnouncementSyndication module is not doing any security checks and is displaying all published announcements. If you need to, you must use standard DNN security mechanism of Page or Module security to manage who can access the feed.

WARNING: AnnouncementSyndication module is provided AS IS. Use it at your own risk. The author or www.tuchka.info are not responsible for any damage being direct or indirect result of using this module.

NOTE: You may use / modify the source code provided below keeping the reference to the original version at www.tuchka.info.

Version History

Version	Notes	DNN	Announcements
1.0.8	Changed the default event when Rss is rendered to Dnn Load (stability)	5.x.x 6.x.x	4.0.3
1.0.7	Added an option to select when the Rss is rendered (stability)	5.x.x 6.x.x	4.0.3
1.0.6	Added guid support with customizable prefix (no permalink) Resorted by announcement date descending	5.4.4 5.6.0	4.0.3
1.0.5	Added caching support Light help for the initial configuration	5.4.4	4.0.3
1.0.4	Initial public release	5.4.4	4.0.3

Downloads

The module can be downloaded from the DotNetNuke store.

Configuration

Installation of the module is a standard procedure so will not be described in deep details. You need to follow these steps to have the module installed:

Download the Module
Login as SuperUser (Host) account
Goto Host -> Extensions
From the command menu select 'Install New Extension'
Browse and select the downloaded Module
Click Next and follow the Wizard up to the end. If there are any problems during the installation, please contact www.tuchka.info

The next thing to do is to create the DNN Anouncement module that you are going to syndicate, unless you have already added it to some page.

Once you have the Announcement Module, you need to create a new Page on your website. This page is going to host the Tuchka.Dnn.AnnouncementSyndication module and at the same time this is going to be the Rss Feed itself. After all configurations, users who enter this new Page will get Rss Feed (in xml) instead of the DNN Page (html). So the Url of the feed will match the Url of the page.

The next step is to add the module to the page:

After the module is added to the page, it will produce a warning saying that it is not configured.

Select 'Settings' from the command menu to go to the module configuration.

On the very bottom of the Module Settings, a new section is added that lets defining the AnnouncementSyndication settings.

All fields are mandatory and pretty self-explanatory:

Announcement Module: Select the Announcement Module to syndicate from the drop down
Rss Title: Enter the title of your Rss Feed
Rss Description: Enter the description of the Rss Feed
Rss Copyright: Enter the copyright string for the Rss Feed
Rss Item Template: This is probably the most difficult piece. The field comes empty but must be populated with the template for the syndicated items. The template follows the rules of the DNN Announcement module and uses its engine to process the tags. You may want to take your Announcement Item Template that can be found on the Settings page of the Announcement module and adjust it a bit so that it is more adopted for the Rss Feed.

Once you are done with the settings, click 'Update' to save the settings and you will be returned to the page, but if you did everything correctly, instead of seeing the page you will see the Rss Feed itself.

If you need to get to the Page or Module Settings in the future, you need to:

Open some other page as Host
Switch the view mode to Layout
Go to the page with Rss. In Layout Mode the modules are not executed and no Rss is generated so you can access the settings.

K.K., 22 Aug 2010

Comments

Tuchka Info 1/17/2012 6:14 PM

If you set the announcement to happen in the future, the module will not syndicate it till the publish day.

Dan 1/17/2012 6:12 PM

How does one configure the RSS to feed items that a in the future?

Tuchka Info 4/25/2011 8:00 PM

Hm. Are you looking for a version that would strip all html tags off of the entire Rss Item Template field, before putting it into the Xml? Including images, links, styles? This doesn't sound hard to implement, but might look funky in the reader as it would also remove linebreaks and paragraphs and might not be that readable...

Tuchka Info 4/25/2011 8:00 PM

What you might consider doing is throwing your feed into the Feedburner with the Summary Bruner enabled (setting the char limit to some high number) Or, I think, you can remove the html tags within the XSLT transformation, and DNN's rss module allows editing and having custom templates. This sounds a bit more correct as you will present the data the way you want it without hving to change the data itself.

Marcus 4/25/2011 7:30 PM

Nice, but it puts all content - pics and all - of the article htmlencoded into the "description" tag of the xml. That makes it difficult to use with newsreader modules (like the DNN RSS module), where you only want to display some data, for example in a vscroll template. I used a workaround where i created a "private page" just for the RSS module, but a little more control over the XML output would be nice :) Otherwise, as mentioned above, nice! Thx for sharing !

Tuchka Info 4/13/2011 4:35 PM

The Feedback module is continuing to surprise me... Not only I can't change the message order, preserve linebreaks, but it also cuts my own messages! Anyway, I wanted to say that you can also enable Anonymous access. You can also try to push the page into a subfolder (like /news on my website) and try to set the authentication mode on it, rather than on the entire website. Might work, i guess.

Tuchka Info 4/13/2011 4:01 PM

Gareth, I don't think my module has any of its own security at all, it actually relies on the security settings of DNN itself. What I think is happening is that when using Active Directory in DNN, your webserver, IIS, might be configured to use Windows Authentication, under which it would expect the client (browser or News Feeds module) to send credentials in a special way for every page of the website, including the once containing RSS Syndication module. However, News Feeds module might not be able to send the user information in that special way even if you specify username and password of a correct Active Directory user. What you might try doing is to enable Basic Authentication together with Windows, in this case News Feeds module (as well as any other client) would be able to send user name and password in a clear text format and this might help you. This solution also has its own drawbacks (security, as the password is sent in clear text). Alternatively, you can ena

Gareth Barnes 4/13/2011 3:38 PM

I've used this module on a couple of sites and it is a great enhancement on the standard Announcements module RSS feed. I'm now trying to use it on an intranet with Active Directory authentication and the News Feeds module returns a 401 Unauthenticated error. I've tried setting a username and password against the news feed and also in the Host Proxy Settings but still get the same error. Can you suggest any way to overcome this? Thanks.

Tuchka.Info 1/26/2011 3:42 PM

James, you need to switch the portal to Layout mode before navigating to the page. The mode can be changed on the top left corner of the Admin panel. You can see an example on the last section of this page.

James R. Atherton 1/26/2011 3:39 PM

How does one edit the page once the module is set up? I need to change a setting or two but the page just goes strait to the feed? I don't want to have to delete the page and recreate it whenever I want to change a setting.

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