Some 3rd-party sites provide feeds of information that can be incorporated into Departmental sites. The supported feed formats are RSS, RDF, and Atom. To add a new feed (or to configure an existing feed), click Site admin > configure feed aggregator.
Adding a new feed
On the next screen, click Add feed. You will then need to specify:
- Title - a title of your choosing
- URL - the address of the feed you wish to import. This must be a link to one of: RSS feed, RDF feed, Atom feed
- Update interval - usually leave this at the default of 1 hour; see next section
- News items in block - the maximum number of items to display at any time
Each feed that you create provides a block, with a title determined by the title you entered for the feed. You will now need to assign your block to a region on your site in order for it to be visible. (Ordinarily, blocks provided by feeds will be placed in the Sidebar region, or possibly the Sub-content region.) Please note that immediately after creating a new feed, no feed items will be visible because the update task will not have run. This is explained in the following section.
Updating Feed items
The webserver periodically runs a scheduled background maintentance process ("cron job") which, amongst other things, causes the feeds to update. The update interval specified when you added the feed is the minimum interval between updates: if, for example, the update interval is set to 1 hour (the default), then each time the backround maintenance process runs it will update update feeds which were last updated more than an hour ago whilst ignoring feeds which have been updated in the last hour.
For most sites, the maintenance process runs once an hour. Thus, after creating a feed, you may have to wait up to an hour before any items are visible.
Configuring or deleting existing feeds
Click Site admin > configure feed aggregator. You will see a list of all existing feeds on the site. If you wish to reconfigure or delete an existing feed, click the appropriate edit link in the list of feeds.
