Creating RSS feeds with limited resources

Hi,

I need to create / using RSS for our website - just started on this. We have limited resources on hand and would like any advice on whats the best way to get started.

We have TeamSite 6.7.1, Coldfusion, IE 6.0 and Firefox.
We are not allowed to install IE 7.0 (its being pushed out later), and cant install any form of RSS reader on our machines. So I need a way to be able to provide our website Internal end-users to read rss thats generated - which leads to the next question.

The entire site is templated with just 3 DCT and TPLS, and the output is generated into ColdFusion (.cfm) format. How would the RSS feeds be generated or maintained? I've read that you can have tpls generate both .cfm and rss files...

Would I need to create a Coldfusion custom web page / reader in order to read the RSS. Or can I use Firefox / Google reader - keep in mind this is for an Intranet.

Thanks in advance to those who reply.

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mike_jaixen

Hi,

I need to create / using RSS for our website - just started on this. We have limited resources on hand and would like any advice on whats the best way to get started.

We have TeamSite 6.7.1, Coldfusion, IE 6.0 and Firefox.
We are not allowed to install IE 7.0 (its being pushed out later), and cant install any form of RSS reader on our machines. So I need a way to be able to provide our website Internal end-users to read rss thats generated - which leads to the next question.

The entire site is templated with just 3 DCT and TPLS, and the output is generated into ColdFusion (.cfm) format. How would the RSS feeds be generated or maintained? I've read that you can have tpls generate both .cfm and rss files...

Would I need to create a Coldfusion custom web page / reader in order to read the RSS. Or can I use Firefox / Google reader - keep in mind this is for an Intranet.

Thanks in advance to those who reply.

RSS is simply another output format based on XML, and thus it's very easy for Interwoven to generate files in this format. However, it may - or may not - fit nicely into your content processes.

We designed our content process to be somewhat flexible; we use workflow to generate pages, get approvals, deploy to all platforms, and submit the files. Our process supports multiple output templates as long as each template is configured to generate a different file extension based on the DCR name. So we simply added rss.tpl, which generates an RSS file with the extension .xml. Our workflow then generates both the HTML and RSS files, and then deploys/submits them.

One trick with trying to generate RSS from Interwoven is that without an RSS reader, it's tough to debug. One option is to use some of the RSS Feed Validators available (such as http://feedvalidator.org/ ); however, this requires you to post the generated RSS on a publicly accessible web site for the validator to read from. This is an iterative process and can be a headache if you've got restrictive change management policies.

ColdFusion can also generate XML, but ColdFusion will need to be able to identify the content items that you want to present via RSS. One limitation to ColdFusion is that some RSS readers (such as My Yahoo!) have issues with reading RSS generated from .cfm URL's.

I've done it both ways, both writing out RSS as XML and also using ColdFusion to filter data (sometimes from a base RSS) to provide users with customized RSS feeds.

Migrateduser

Thanks for the reply.

At this time, we are going to create a 2nd tpl and a script to read the tpls within a specific area by extracting the required fields from dcrs and plug the values into the tpl in order to create the rss feed.

Until MS-IE 7.0 gets pushed out, we are doing this in development for proof-of-concept.

One thing of interest I have found is you can turn on RSS feed discovery by placing one line of code within your home / web page. For instance, if a user lands on a page that has a RSS feed available, the orange rss icon will light up (this works for both MS-IE 7.0 and Firefox). Refer to this link for more information (its just one line of code within your header tag).
http://blogs.msdn.com/rssteam/articles/publishersguide.aspx

A couple of other comments:
- Sage is a nice Firefox RSS feed reader.
- Google Reader for RSS does not work for Intranets - only for external contents.

Feel free to elaborate or add any thoughts about RSS via Teamsite.

bturns

I built a simple javascript RSS reader that I include in each of my generated pages. We allow content contributors the ability to add an RSS feed to any page that they create. I also built a couple RSS tpls that generate RSS feeds. The RSS tpl's pull the title, date, and URL from each DCR in a particular section and generate the RSS feeds.

If you're interested I can tell you more.

brian.turner@kp.org