BBNews Documentation

The bitboxx bbnews module is a DNN module for collecting and providing news on your portal. It is able to collect news from a RSS/Atom feeds or from twitter. Alternatively you can write your own news. News display is full templated and could be provided as RSS feed too. The minimum DNN Version for this module is 06.01.00 (since V 1.2.0 minimum DNN Version is 08.00.00) !

Whats new ?

Version 01.02.00 (25.03.2014):

• Compatibility for DNN 8+
• Fixed some issues when retrieving Feeds
• Added MetaData field to support XML Data in special News Field

Version 01.01.05 (25.03.2014):

• Fixed a bug replacing only first url in twitter feed with a link in the news
• Fixed a bug attaching complete html code after rss code
• Fixed a bug when feeditem.pubdate is empty or not present

Version 01.01.04 (20.01.2014):

• Twitter feeds are working again now. To get this running you need some app credentials. Create a new app on https://dev.twitter.com/apps and get your consumer and access keys and tokens. Enter these in the “Manage BBNews”-Twitter Tab.
• Fixed some errors in the UI (DNN Form Pattern)
• Fixed a bug not showing the correct favicon
• Fixed an error which occured while retrieving some RSS feeds (e.g. blogs-feed on dotnetnuke.com).
• Fixed an error with ambiguous NewsId when opening "Manage BBNews".
• RSS icon has wrong path if DNN is installed in subdirectory
• Added some error tolerance to parsing of RSS feeds
• Added default values for settings "NewsInRow" and "RowsPerPage" to avoid error message if these are not set.

Installation

Install the module like every DNN module as a host account in System – Extensions or directly from the DNN Forge. After installation place a bitboxx bbnews module on the page where you want to show the news entries.

Module Settings

In the module settings you have 3 main options for the display:

• The first is “Table”. That means that the news will be displayed in a tabular way. You can define how many news per row and how many rows should be displayed. (If you choose 3 news per row and 5 rows, 15 news would be shown if present). If you have more news, paging would be enabled automatically. To prevent paging, enter a number in “News Count”.
• The second Option is “Marquee”. If you choose this option, your news are scrolling through your module with speed and direction how defined in the settings.
• Last possible option is “Detail”. This option is for displaying only one news with its full text. A module of this type should be placed on an extra “News” page which is not included in menu. Another news module on another page with setting “Page for own news” pointing to this page shows then a list of your own news with summary text. Clicking on the link brings you to the page with the detailed news text.

The settings in detail:

Templates

bitboxx bbnews module contains the new template editor. You can select from a predefined list of templates which are shown as thumbnail. If you select “New” or “Edit”, display changes and you can edit the template text or create a new one. To support multilanguage websites, the same mimic as the resource files is used. There is one neutral template (“Shortnews.htm”). This one could only be edited by the host. If a non-host user is logged in, he can only edit the portal-specific template “Shortnews.Portal-0.htm”. If he wants to have a special template for german language, he edits the ”Shortnews.de-DE.Portals-0.htm”. When the news is shown, bitboxx bbnews module looks for special portal and language versions. If none is found, the default is chosen.

the template editor contains a list of all special bbnews tokens:

Manage BBNews

In the BBNews Administration you can manage your feeds and news and how the are collected:

Categories

Categories build a collection of feeds. You can have multiple feeds in one category and assign this category to a specific bitboxx bbnews module . The news of all feeds in the selected category will be shown in this module.

Feeds

Feeds are the source for your news. You can have different types of feeds. The feed type None means that you manually write the news. Furthermore, you can still choose between a RSS / Atom feed, the Twitter timeline and the search for a keyword in Twitter.

CategoryFeeds

After selecting a category you are able to choose one or more from the list of your defined feeds which should belong to the this category. You can select the same feed in multiple categories!

News

Searching news, edit saved news and / or create new news. You can hide any news from display without deleting them! You can search a special news by Text, by Category and by publishing date:

Editing a news or creating a new one brings you to the following options:

Scheduler

The DNN scheduler checks in the defined interval your feed table for feeds that should be refreshed. You can disable the scheduler (no new news will arrive) or edit the interval

MetaData

New in version 01.02.00 for DNN8+ : The news table has a new MetaData field that is also filled by the RSS collector (the original content of RSS feed or twitter result is saved as JSON).

{
   "AttributeExtensions":{

   },
   "Authors":[

   ],
   "BaseUri":null,
   "Categories":[

   ],
   "Content":null,
   "Contributors":[

   ],
   "Copyright":null,
   "ElementExtensions":[
      {
         "OuterName":"comments",
         "OuterNamespace":""
      },
      {
         "OuterName":"comments",
         "OuterNamespace":"http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/slash/"
      },
      {
         "OuterName":"commentRss",
         "OuterNamespace":"http://wellformedweb.org/CommentAPI/"
      },
      {
         "OuterName":"ping",
         "OuterNamespace":"http://madskills.com/public/xml/rss/module/trackback/"
      },
      {
         "OuterName":"creator",
         "OuterNamespace":"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
      }
   ],
   "Id":"f1397696-738c-4295-afcd-943feb885714:155386",
   "LastUpdatedTime":"\/Date(-62135596800000)\/",
   "Links":[
      {
         "AttributeExtensions":{

         },
         "BaseUri":null,
         "ElementExtensions":[

         ],
         "Length":0,
         "MediaType":null,
         "RelationshipType":"alternate",
         "Title":null,
         "Uri":"http://www.dnnsoftware.com/community-blog/cid/155386/introducing-shake-mobile-content-editing-just-turned-sexy"
      }
   ],
   "PublishDate":"\/Date(1478521200000)\/",
   "SourceFeed":null,
   "Summary":{
      "Text":"\r\n\r\n\r\nOur newest\u0026nbsp;revolution\u0026nbsp;(yes, that means turning...) on 2sxc is shake support to show\u0026nbsp;in-page\u0026nbsp;editing buttons.\u0026nbsp;Shake it!",
      "Type":"text",
      "AttributeExtensions":{

      }
   },
   "Title":{
      "Text":"Introducing Shake: Mobile Content Editing just turned Sexy",
      "Type":"text",
      "AttributeExtensions":{

      }
   }
}

These values can then used as placeholder tokens in the template: [BBNEWS:Meta|Summary.Text] or [BBNEWS:Meta|Title.Text] or [BBNEWS:Meta|Id]