[Pro] News/Blog Reel

I’m currently developing a new site for my coach, and one area giving me difficulty in Freeway is creating a blog/newsreel. What he wants is a mix of blog entries and a feed (http://gymnasticbodies.com/wod/index.php) to be integrated in (so they parse by date). I found a couple php blog scripts that I can use, but I’m not sure how I would

a) either turn the WoD into a rss or workable format; or have it import into the blog itself
b) create an area on the main page that displays the combined feed

I could do it manually, but I’d be updating the page daily, which isn’t fun; and coach would like to be able to post to the blog by himself through a WYSIWYG editor.

Closest thing I’ve managed so far is setting up an iframe with a css menu placed above where the user can click either “WoD” or “Blog” and the appropriate feed loads in the iframe.

Blogger is outta the question as it has to be hosted on the site, and Wordpress doesn’t seem to be easy to integrate for just the blog feature. Any ideas?


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I forgot to mention that the WoD feed created by the previous web guy simply scans the PhPBB databased for the first post in the last several threads chronologically and displays it. Perhaps there is some way to do something similar integrated on a freeway page so I could just make a rss?


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There are lots of different ways that you can create content-managed areas in a Freeway site. WebYep and SNews come to mind, there are extensive (and inexpensive!) Actions available for the former, with lush and lavish documentation, which makes the integration with your layout very straightforward and Freeway-like.

Getting the RSS feed from this combined site (parts static, parts dynamic, parts PHPBB[1]) is a larger challenge. What you really need is a sort of sidecar application that can run on a schedule, check what’s new in the site, and publish an updated feed. I had a quick Google for this, and found a lot of likely possibilities, but in the end, it might be simplest to code this part yourself, as it will give you the finest-grained control over the precise elements that are listed, the amount of detail you show in your feed, etc.

And if you need to show an existing RSS feed within your Freeway page as HTML, there’s my ReadFeed Action available at ActionsForge to make that fairly straightforward.

So for a first step, do everything except the feed. Get everything set up and working so that the HTML is good, your customer is able to add and edit content to his or her wont, and leave the feed for the last. It is a technical exercise, after all.

When you have the site ready, post a link to it here, and I’ll show you how to write a recursive crawler in a couple dozen lines of code. It’s fun and instructive, and the best part is that you can make it precisely the way you want it, rather than using one of the many “content generators” that Google offers up when you query “convert HTML to RSS”. This whole market category appears to be where those god-awful domain squatter sites get their “pages”.

Walter

  1. I haven’t looked at it in several years, but PHPBB once held the record for the most-hacked server-side application in the Web world. Having it on your server was (and might still be) like rolling out the Welcome mat to any script-kiddy who wanted to root your server and take down all the other sites hosted on it. (Not just the ones you know about, but the hundreds or thousands of other sites typically configured on a single shared Apache server.)

On Dec 4, 2011, at 5:50 PM, Cory Fairchild wrote:

I forgot to mention that the WoD feed created by the previous web guy simply scans the PhPBB databased for the first post in the last several threads chronologically and displays it. Perhaps there is some way to do something similar integrated on a freeway page so I could just make a rss?


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The webyeps cms matched exactly what I needed, thank you for the suggestion. I’ll get it integrated into the draft of the website and post it up here.

In regards to the PhpBB security issues, how do you suggest going about educating myself to help minimize the risk of something like that happening? We have a very information dense forum, so the only chance of using a different platform would be if we could migrate the old database into it.


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On Dec 7, 2011, at 5:39 PM, Cory Fairchild wrote:

The webyeps cms matched exactly what I needed, thank you for the suggestion. I’ll get it integrated into the draft of the website and post it up here.

In regards to the PhpBB security issues, how do you suggest going about educating myself to help minimize the risk of something like that happening? We have a very information dense forum, so the only chance of using a different platform would be if we could migrate the old database into it.

If you’re only moving once, it’s generally pretty simple to write a few queries and move everything over from one format to another.

But if you’re stuck in PHPBB, I would recommend that you upgrade it to the absolute newest version possible. And subscribe to any feeds or mailing lists with security updates, and apply them religiously.

It’s a very popular forum, and it’s open source. Therefore it has what security boffins call a “large attack surface”. Exploits are found, assembly-line style, and rolled into Perl scripts that the script kiddies use to penetrate servers. Often these will work for a particular version or sub-sub-sub version of the software, and be patched quickly. But if you don’t stay on top of your patches, it’s fairly likely that your server will be affected. And you might not see the damage at all, not if the hackers are clever. They just use the holes in the forum to get in, root the server, and go hunting for more useful things like credit card numbers or simply set up their warez server in plain sight.

The best open-source forum I have seen lately is Vanilla. You may find that someone in that community has written a conversion script to import all your old posts and account data, too, so it’s worth looking around on their site and googling for help.

Walter


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HI Cory and Walter
just thought I better post that I have been mucking about with trying to get webyep content into some sort of rss feed ready format and you can see the result here:

feed://www.feed43.com/4804516288042383.xml

what I have used is a system that converts areas that I choose (which in this case is a loop) into a rss compatible format and from the quick test I did, this particular converter worked very well. With a free package for those not needing instant updates it seems like a good set up.

Anyway it may be of interest
all the best Max


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