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 can simply install this extension, create some category (e. g. ) and set it as a news category. Then, if you want to publish a news item on your channel, you should create an article in your wiki, include it into that news category and save it. The article will be instantly published on the channel: it's title will be the headline and it's 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. Remove names inside braces and leave just  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;

Feed access and subscription
When configuration is done, feed subscription option will automatically appear in browsers of your site visitors. The feed can also be manually accessed by pressing "Create feed" button on "Special:NewsChannel" page on your wiki. Some additional optional parameters can be specified on that page too. When the feed is created, you can get it's URL address from your browser and post it to FeedBurner or wherever you like.

Please, note, that when you specify additional news category on "Special:NewsChannel" page and press "Create feed" button, only the articles that are included in both news categories at once are exported to that derived feed. That is done so to enable several different feeds on one site. For example, one feed about IT news contains articles in categories "News" and "IT news", another feed about politics contains articles in categories "News" and "Political news", etc.

Version history

 * 1.64 — "author" field added to individual news items.
 * 1.63 — Minor bugfix.
 * 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.