Generic site update RSS feeds?

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8/31/2010 5:30:26 PM
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Generic site update RSS feeds?

Hi Joe and all,

I'm looking for a little advice. We're using mojoPortal as the engine for a municipal government web site. We want to be able to give citizens the ability to subscribe to RSS feeds when key portions of the site are updated. Obviously, news releases and some other "episodic" publications can be handled by the Blog module's RSS feed. And for City events we have Event Calendar Pro with its RSS solution. However, there are other areas that don't really lend themselves to blog format, but people would want to be able to watch via RSS. A couple of examples would be:

New job opportunities (All currently open job opportunities are listed in a table in an HTML instance)
Postings of new City Council agendas and minutes (these are PDF files linked on pages by date)

What would be the best method to get those types of updates into an RSS feed?

Thanks!
Jamie

9/1/2010 9:06:55 AM
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Re: Generic site update RSS feeds?

Hi Jaime,

You could implement custom RSS feed(s) either as .aspx or .ashx pages. There are several code examples for rendering rss feeds in existing features.

The problem with exposing feeds is that feeds are for anonymous visitors and if we build in a feed it makes it easy to leak information that would otherwise be protected by roles on pages and modules. Not saying it is un solvable but it is difficult to make some site wide feed while still enforcing security correctly since most security requires the context of a pageid to get page level security and a module id to get module level security. I'm sure at some point I will work on a strategy for it but for now I'd recommend implement your own custom feed(s). 

By doing custom feeds you can craft your own sql and expose or not expose any content from the database according to your own decisions about what to make public.

Best,

Joe

9/1/2010 10:50:42 AM
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Re: Generic site update RSS feeds?

Hey Joe, thanks for the ideas. As a "no code" option, we were also considering creating hidden blogs on the key pages, and the people who update those pages would also be responsible for adding blog entries that would then be exposed as RSS for subscribers. Not an ideal solution, of course, because edits can be missed, but it might provide the best flexibility since we can't really prompt the user for important information like "edit reason" at save time.

I'll look forward to your eventual strategy for this. Thanks again for such a wonderful product!

Jamie

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