$Revision: 1.22 $

Copyright (c) 2002-2006 Infrae. All rights reserved.
See also LICENSE.txt

Meta::

  Valid for:   Silva News Network 2.1
  Authors:     Guido Wesdorp, Martijn Faassen, Wim Boucquaert
  Emails:      guido@infrae.com, faassen@infrae.com, wim@infrae.com
  CVS:         $Revision: 1.22 $

Silva News Network

  Silva is a Zope-based web application designed for the creation and
  management of structured, textual content. Silva allows users to enter new
  documents as well as edit existing documents using a web interface.

  Silva News Network is an extension to Silva to allow authors to place
  articles and agendaitems on the Silva site and show them on a page.

  There are versions for older Silva versions available for download as well.
  No other products are required to use Silva News Network from Silva, besides
  the products required to run Silva itself.

Installing Silva News Network

  See INSTALL.txt

Using Silva News Network

  The first thing to do is add subjects and target audiences to the
  service_news object in the Silva root in the ZMI. This object is used only to
  manage those lists (subjects and target audiences), these will function as
  criteria for the newsfilters (more on these later in this document) to search
  on. It would be best to add as much subjects and target audiences as
  currently available to the service when setting up News, since the lists are
  the basis of the filtering system and one has to dive into the ZMI to add
  items (therefore it requires appropriate rights to edit stuff in the ZMI).
  Managing these lists is quite straightforward: you can add an item by filling
  in a string into one of the textfields and pressing on the corresponding
  'add' button, and remove them by checking the checkbox in front of an item
  and clicking the corresponding 'remove' button.

  Adding a News Publication

    Newsitems can only be added to newspublication. To add one, go to the SMI
    and choose 'Silva News Publication' from the menu of addables (upper left
    corner of the edit tab in folders, publications and the Silva root). Enter
    an id and a title and choose 'Add and edit', you will then be taken to the
    edit tab of the newspublication.  This tab looks a lot like the edit tab of
    other containers (folders, publications) in Silva, except it doesn't have a
    default document or view and can not contain anything other then news items
    (articles and agenda items), folders and publications (thus allowing a more
    structured setup of the newspublication).You can add newsitems by choosing
    a specific type from the addables menu in this tab.

  Properties tab

    In the properties tab of newspublication there is a checkbox called
    'restrict access'. When this is checked, the folder can only be found by
    news- and agendafilters in the same folder the folder is on and each
    subfolder of that folder. This can be used to make the newspublication
    'private', making it available only to for example 1 department.

  Adding news items

    Now authors can add newsitems. As stated before, there are two types of
    newsitems: articles and agendaitems. The main differences are that
    agendaitems must contain a date/time on which the event described in them
    takes place, and contain a location on which the event takes place. The
    start date/time is necessary to show the items in agendaviewers, since they
    show the items for a particular period (e.g. a month). Therefore
    agendaviewers can show only agendaitems. Newsviewers are capable of showing
    both articles and agendaitems. Other datafields required for the system to
    work correctly are 'subjects' and 'target audiences', which the author can
    use to classify the newsitem. These fields will later be used by the
    newsfilters as criteria for routing the items to newsviewers. When editing
    an article or agenda item, keep in mind that the first heading placed in
    the content editor is considered to be the subheader of the newsitem, and
    the first paragraph as the lead (both will show up in the preview on the
    viewers).

  Adding news filters

    The next thing to do to make the system work is adding one or more news-
    and agendafilters. These are objects used by editors or chief- editors to
    filter a stream of newsitems. The items can be filtered on subject and
    target audience (so for instance a newsfilter can route only newsitems with
    a specific subject or meant for a specific target audience to the viewers)
    and/or individually (per newsitem). Another feature of the filters is the
    ability to 'stick to the current path', when set this makes the filters 
    pick up items only if they're in a subdirectory of the filter's container.

  The Filters' edit tab

    The contents tab of a newsfilter shows a list of all available
    newspublications (excluding the ones made private by checking the 'restrict
    access' checkbox that are not in the same folder or a parentfolder of the
    newsfilter). To route newsitems of a newspublication to newsviewers (more
    about those later) make sure the checkbox in front of the newspublication
    is checked and click the 'update sources' button. All (published) newsitems
    that conform to the criteria of the newsfilter will then be routed to the
    newsviewers that use this filter. These criteria can be set in the
    'Properties' tab of the newsfilter: you see the lists of subjects and
    target audiences of service_news again, and in newsfilters also a couple of
    radiobuttons to select whether the filter should route agendaitems as well
    as articles. These criteria can be used to distribute articles and
    agendaitems in different ways across the Silva instance to newsviewers.

    For example: a number of different newspublications can contain both
    articles and agendaitems of different subjects and targeting different
    audiences, and the newsfilters filter and distribute specific items to
    viewers. Please note that this means that filters must be sensibly set up
    for the site to allow all newsitems to be shown somewhere: it is very easy
    to set up the system in a way that articles and agendaitems with a specific
    subject or target audience are filtered out by all newsfilters, and
    therefore be excluded from all viewers.

  The Items tab

    The 'Items' tab can be used to filter out specific items, to allow editors
    and chiefeditors to disallow specific articles and agendaitems to be routed
    by a filter. To filter out a specific item, uncheck the checkbox in front
    of it and choose 'update'.

  Now the news- and agendaviewers can be placed. The viewers are the objects
  responsible for showing the articles and agendaitems to the public. An author
  can place viewers where he wants news to be shown.  The viewers show a list
  of items routed by the filters.

  The Viewer's Edit tab

    The viewers are quite easy to set up: the only tab that matters is the
    first one (edit), where you can set the number of days the viewer will look
    back (for newsviewers) or ahead (for agendaviewers) to get items. In the
    case of newsviewers there is also a switch to choose a number of items to
    be shown. Also there is a list of available filters. All filters chosen
    here are used for retrieving news. When placed, the viewers will be
    available to the public and show articles and/or agendaitems, together with
    an archive (that allows showing items for a particular month) and a search
    option.

    Appending /rss to the URL of a NewsViewer will show the RSS 1.0 (RDF
    compliant) view of the items in this viewer.

  The RSSAggregator

    The RSSAggregator replaces the old (and now removed) RSSViewer. In the
    tab_edit you'll see a textbox called 'RSS feeds' where you can enter the
    complete URLs for the feeds you want to have merged by this aggregator
    instance.

    All the other functionality is the same as for News Viewers.

License

  Silva News Network is released under the BSD license. See 'LICENSE.txt'.
