Topic: Using SimplePortal to generate content for NewsNow

[newcastle-online]

Hello there.

As a football website we're toying with the idea of binning our WordPress-based front page site and using SimplePortal with SMF to create articles suitable for NewsNow. Is this possible, and if so does anyone have experience of doing such a thing?

We're fed up of WordPress and would like an integrated solution; retaining our forum as the basis of the site but also being able to appear on NewsNow periodically to attract new people to our opinion-based pieces.

Thanks.

[[SiNaN]]

Welcome to SimplePortal.

Can you elaborate what you mean by "suitable for NewsNow"?

[newcastle-online]

Sorry if I didn't explain myself properly.

Currently we have an SMF forum and a WordPress-based front page. They are totally separate, but some forum members have been given admin rights to upload articles (opinion pieces on Newcastle United, match previews etc) directly onto WordPress. We are registered with NewsNow, which means when an article is published in WordPress it appears as a story on this page: http://www.newsnow.co.uk/h/Sport/Football/Premier+League/Newcastle+United. I believe it works via an RSS feed of our WordPress page.

What we want to do is get rid of WordPress altogether and just have our SMF forum, but retain our presence on NewsNow. So we came across SimplePortal as one of the major features is its article publishing feature, which from what I can see means a thread can be 'promoted' to appear on the portal homepage as 'news'. We want to use this function to promote standard SMF threads (those written by our piece writers) so they're 'news' and get those articles to appear on the above NewsNow link.

Now I know SMF can generate an RSS feed from any page and what we want may be possible without the need for SimplePortal at all, but considering the function to promote threads to the portal homepage it would be nice if we could marry the two elements up.

So the theory is:

• Someone on our forum writes an opinion piece.
• It is posted in a standard football board on our forum.
• The thread is promoted to the SimplePortal 'news' page.
• The article appears on the NewsNow link I posted above.

Apologies for the length!

[[SiNaN]]

Okay, it's more clear now.

First of all, we do not have the forum-independent articles feature implemented yet. It is still being worked on. Current articles feature, give you the ability to publish the topics that you select from various boards of you forum on your portal. It includes pagination, read more, avatar, category image etc...

Alternatively, we have the Board News block, which does the exact same thing as the articles; but the only difference is, it automatically gets topics from one definite board you select.

If you don't want your articles to be posted in forum, unfortunately, we can't help much for now.

But if it okay for you to post them into the forum, you have two options:

+ Create a read-only board and set it as News board for Board News block.
+ Use articles feature with some codes, which would create feeds for them like the board feeds.

And no need for apology. You can't imagine how details you give, makes things easier for us.

[newcastle-online]

Thanks again for your reply, I understand the articles features better now.

It's fine for us to post the articles in the forum, that's what we want.

I suppose what I want to know is whether an RSS feed can be generated for the articles feature so that only the original post appears in the feed, and not the subsequent comments. If the comments appear in the feed that will flood NewsNow (I think).

To put it more simply; you have on the portal homepage of this forum a list of news articles which people have then commented on. Could an RSS feed be made for the portal homepage that only updates when there is a new news articles, or will it be updated whenever there's a comment too?

The only type of RSS feed I've seen on SMF forums shows all comments, for example: http://simpleportal.net/index.php?board=3.0;type=rss;action=.xml. I want a feed that only updates when there's a new thread.

If it's not possible to have such a feed, we'll have to use a read-only board, have the Board News block update automatically and in each article just link to a duplicate thread in our normal forum board for discussion.

I hope I've explained this correctly!

[newcastle-online]

Aha!

I've found this: http://www.myurl.com/folder/index.php?board=X;sa=news;type=rss;action=.xml;limit=Y which only shows the original posts in the last (Y) threads from board (X).

So all I need to do is create a new board within my forum for articles and submit a link based on the above to NewsNow. The Board News block can automatically create news from the topics for the portal homepage and we can allow comments as the above RSS link only shows the first post, so no duplication is needed.

Thanks for your help, I think I'm sorted!

[[SiNaN]]

Okay then, marking as solved.