Extension:News Channel

Purpose and usage
If you would like to make a custom RSS 2.0 and/or Atom 1.0 news channel on your wiki, you simply install this extension, create some category (e. g. ) and register it as news category. Then, if you want to publish a news item on your channel, you create an article in your wiki, include it into that news category and save it. The article will be instantly published on the channel: its title will be the headline and its text will be the description of news item. Wikimarkup is automatically converted into HTML.

Installation

 * 1) Download the extension code.
 * 2) Unzip and save the code files in your wiki's   directory in a subdirectory.
 * 3) Changes your wiki's LocalSettings.php to include the line:

Configuration
Since version 1.6, all configuration settings are specified in global variables in LocalSettings.php file. These variables must be set after " " directives. Here are the sample settings and their description.

Channel title: $wgNewsChannelTitle = 'MyWikiSite.com IT News'; Channel description, preferably just one sentence: $wgNewsChannelDescription = 'Most hot IT news on MyWikiSite.'; Channel's language code and optional country subcode, e. g.. By default it's a language, specified in $wgLanguageCode variable in LocalSettings.php file. $wgNewsChannelLanguage = 'en-US'; Channel copyright note: $wgNewsChannelCopyright = 'Copyright © MyWikiSite.com. All rights reserved.'; Channel logo. In RSS 2.0 specification only JPG, GIF or PNG formats are allowed; recommended default size is 88x31. In Atom 1.0 format an image should have 1:1 aspect ratio. The image should be suitable for presentation at a small size. $wgNewsChannelLogoImage = 'http://www.mywikisite.com/rssicon.png' ; Time in minutes before channel cache invalidation occurs (in other words, update interval): $wgNewsChannelUpdateInterval = '60'; Default number of recent (most fresh) news to list on the channel: $wgNewsChannelDefaultItems = 10; Absolute limit of news items to list on the channel. Protects site from overload. $wgNewsChannelMaxItems = 50; Name or alias of channel's editor-in-chief: $wgNewsChannelEditorName = 'John Doe'; E-mail of channel's editor-in-chief: $wgNewsChannelEditorAddress = 'newseditor@mywikisite.com'; Name or alias of channel webmaster: $wgNewsChannelWebMasterName = 'Jane Doe'; E-mail of channel webmaster: $wgNewsChannelWebMasterAddress = 'webmaster@mywikisite.com'; Title of category, containing news articles: $wgNewsChannelCategory = 'News'; Title of category, that must be excluded from export: $wgNewsChannelExcludeCategory = 'Delayed publications'; Optional prefix to remove from news article titles to clean channel headlines (don't include namespace prefix here, it will be removed automatically): $wgNewsChannelRemoveArticlePrefix = 'News/'; Names (wiki accounts) of users, allowed to publish news on the channel. Pass empty  to allow everyone. $wgNewsChannelAuthorizedEditors = array( 'John Doe', 'Jane Doe', 'Alex' ); Option to export text only. If set to true, links to images and media files are removed from feed. $wgNewsChannelExportTextOnly = false;

Version history

 * 1.62 — Many translations added; two minor bugs were fixed.
 * 1.61 — Several translations added; minor bug was fixed.
 * 1.6 — Configuration switched completely to global variables. Many internal improvements.
 * 1.52 — Minor internal improvements.
 * 1.51 — Code documentation reformatted.
 * 1.5 — MySQL 4.0 support added; configuration by global variables allowed; French translation added; several minor improvements.
 * 1.41 — atom:link changed.
 * 1.4 — An option added to combine multiple news categories and to exclude unwanted categories.
 * 1.33 — News item's timestamp is now set to time, when corresponding article was added to news category (in previous versions it was the time of article creation or last edit).
 * 1.31 — RSS/Atom HTTP content headers added.
 * 1.3 — An option to convert wikimarkup to HTML added; German interface translation added.
 * 1.21 — A minor bug was fixed.
 * 1.2 — Atom 1.0 format added; authorization for news publication added; compliance to W3C best practice guide improved.

Contacts
If you would like to report a bug, request a feature, or could help with localization (extension messages translation), please, send me a letter to [mailto:codedriller@gmail.com codedriller@gmail.com]. Please, feel free to notify me about any problems. By the way, if you need advanced bot functionality for your wiki, take a look at free DotNetWikiBot Framework, that I maintain.