|
Quick Start Guide - Virtual Newspaper Manager |
|
Monday, 14 April 2008 |
You can start importing content to your site easily by following these steps. In this example we will create a sports newspaper, in which we have the main category "Sports", and the subcategories "Soccer", "Basketball" and "Handball". Anyway, this component is a powerful tool once you know how it works.
MANAGING THE BACK END
Creating a simple sports newspaper:
1.- Decide the source of your news. This is the RSS Feeds you like most. Add them to the RSS feeds list. You can add as many feeds as you want. As our site we'll be a sport one, we can choose some feeds from sports magazines, blogs, etc. We chose these ones:
- For the general sport news --> http://feeds.marca.com/marca/ultimahora?format=xml
- For soccer news--> http://www.marca.com/servicios/rss/internacional.xml
- For basket news--> http://www.marca.com/servicios/rss/nba.xml
- For handball news--> http://www.marca.com/servicios/rss/balonmano.xml
2.- Create the category tree. Click on "Categories" and add the new ones as told above.
When creating a category, you don't have to write anything in SQL Query, it is filled automatically depending on the rules selected. As there are no rules created, just write the category name, select the parent category and save it.
3.- Now we'll create the rules on which we will associate each feed to each category. You can build really complex rules by filling each field with the desired condition. In our example, we'll only do two things:
- 3.1 Select the rss link from the selection menu, under the title "Link". For example, http://feeds.marca.com/marca/ultimahora?format=xml
- 3.2 Select the category to which the RSS feed will be associated. For example,
"Sports"
It is possible to assign multiple categories to a RSS feed, or a single RSS feed to multiple categories, or even various feeds to various categories.
Every field that you leave blank will be ignored in the rules.
4.- Click on the menu "RSS Feeds". Select the feeds you wish and then click on "Download News". Every new downloaded will appear under the 'Pending Classification News'.
5.- Go to the "Pending Classification News" menu. Select the news from this list and then click "Classify". They will be classified according with the rules and categories created previously.
6.- Go to the "News" menu. You'll see a list of the classified news that are stored on your database. Each item should appear belonging to the appropiate category. These items are not Joomla article items yet, but any user can see them from the front end section of the component.
7.- Under the section "News", you can also copy or move these news as Joomla articles. Select the items you want and click on "Copy to Joomla Content". You'll be redirected to a page on which you select the destination category and the action to perform, copy or move.
Once you move/copy news to Joomla content you can manage them as usual articles.
WHAT TO SHOW IN THE FRONT END TO OUR WEBSITE USERS
There is also a section in the back end from wich we can control wich category and how will be displayed to the users. This is very simple:
Go to section "Settings". Click on the "New" button. Fill these three fields:
1.- Name. Just to identify this configuration from the rest.
2.- Frontpage Category. Select the category which news will appear on the front page, it means, when the component is loaded in the front end, the latest added news belonging to this category will be displayed.
3.- Number of News. The number of news displayed.
After saving that configuration, you can create as many as you want but only one will be shown in the front page.
To finish this step, just select the configuration you wish and click on "Select for Home".
|
