Tutorial

Intro

Creating and using RSS feeds is straightforward and fairly painless. The first thing you or your staff will need to do is create RSS feeds within the system. This can be achieved through the use of the Setup tab located on the far right side of the OmniUpdate tab bar. Once there you’ll see a sub menu called RSS (see Figure 1.1 for reference). RSS groups are located at the top, and RSS feeds are located on the bottom. These two lists will grow as you begin to create feeds and populate them through the system.

Creating a New Feed

Lets get started. First thing we’ll need to do is create a new feed. Do this by clicking on the “New Feed” button in the “RSS Feeds” list. Doing so will bring up the RSS properties screen (Figure 1.2).

The Path field determines where the RSS feed will be created and must be absolute to the root (eg: /rss/newfeed.xml). RSS Feed paths are not modifiable after creation, so be sure to take the organization of your file structure into consideration before creating the feed.

The Template field allows you to choose which pre-defined XML structure you’d like to use to base the feed off of. If you don't see a template listed in the drop-down menu, please contact support for assistance.

The Title field allows you to enter in an informational title for your feed that will inform subscribers what this feed is about.

The Description field gives you the opportunity to describe this feed in further detail.

The Link field should contain an absolute URL to your website (eg: http://www.omniupdate.com).

The Publication Date can be used to advertise when this feed was created.

The Item Count field gives you the option to decide how many items will display in your feed at any given time. Once the number of items in an RSS feed reaches this number any older RSS items will be removed from the feed.

Click on Create and you'll be ready to start adding items.

Adding Items to a Feed

Now that you have an RSS feed created, you can start setting up pages to be added to the feed. This can be done by opening the Access settings (Figure 1.3) for any document or directory in the system.

Once you've clicked on the Access button, you'll see a screen much like the one shown in (Figure 1.4). This screen will allow you to specify which RSS feed you'd like this page to be assigned to. Once you've selected an RSS Feed from the drop-down menu, press Save.

Now that you've saved the access settings for your page, you should see a new icon next to your page. This is the RSS icon (Figure 1.5). If you click on it you will be presented with a screen much like the one shown in (Figure 1.6).

The Title field allows you to enter in an informational title for your article that will inform your readers what the article is about.

The Description field gives you the opportunity to describe the article in further detail.

The Link field should contain a link back to the absolute URL of the published article.

The Author field can contain the name and email address of the content author.

The Publication Date can be manually entered here, but we recommend that you leave it set to "[auto]" so that OmniUpdate can automatically fill it in with today's date.

The Extra XML field allows you define additional XML nodes that you would like to include in this articles RSS information. XML information should be entered in the form of <node>data</node>.

Once you've entered in all the required information, click Create and publish your page. Once your page has been published, the article information that you defined here will be added to your RSS Feed.

Editing Items

If at any point you'd like to go back and edit an RSS item within a feed, you can access previously published articles with the Items button (Figure 1.7).

Upon clicking the Items button you will be presented with the list of RSS items available for editing within a feed (Figure 1.8).

Here you can click on either the name of the article, or the Edit button to access the edit screen (Figure 1.9). You can also click on the Delete button to remove unwanted items from your RSS Feed.

Make your desired changes to the item and then click Update. Be sure to rebuild your RSS feed once your done making changes (Figure 2.0) to republish the RSS feed to your production server.

Creating an Aggeregate Feed

Aggregate feeds combine several feeds into one single RSS XML file. For sites with multiple RSS feeds segregated into categories, aggregate feeds are useful in combining all categories into a single feed that is easy to distribute.

Gather and serve all your separate news feeds automatically with RSS Groups!

Once in the RSS setup view, click on the "New Group" button as shown in the figure below:

After filling out the form shown in figure 3.2, a new feed will be created at the path that you choose. You will be able to add member feeds later.

• Path - absolute path to the RSS XML file that is created
• Template - header and footer template for the RSS feed XML
• Title - your feed title
• Description - summary of the content someone could expect to find in your feed
• Link - a link to display at the top of your feed
• Publication Date - an optional field that specifies the date of publication for this feed. An analogy for this would be the publication date for a periodical or magazine.
• Item Count - the maximum number of items to display in the feed. Old items are dropped from the feed. Make this field blank to keep all items.

Once your RSS Group is created, you can add member feeds to it. To do so, click on the "members" icon in the RSS Group list, as shown in the diagram below:

To add members to the aggregate feed, simply select the feeds you want on the left and click the add button. To remove feeds, select those feeds on the right and click the remove button. The "members" window for an example RSS Group is shown below: