Announcements Portlet Extension

Topic from External Feed

This page contains start of plan to extend Announcements Portlet to consume external feeds.

Format of the feed

We are currently assuming the external feed would be in the form of an RSS xml document.  The portlet would use the ROME library to manage parsing of all variations. 

Extensions to the RSS feed are possible using additional namespaces such as terms specified by Qualified Dublin Core:

xmlns:dcterms="http://purl.org/dc/terms/"

For example Qualified Dublin Core. has an extension for the Date (often a range) of validity of a resource.  This could be used to specify how long the feed or individual messages should be displayed or cached.

<dcterms:valid>

The Dublin Core RSS extensions also define a class of entity for whom the resource is intended or useful.  This could be used to specify the audience in the feed rather than in the topic setup. 

<dcterms:audience>

Admin Interface

Topic administration

The topic administrator should be able to

  • Edit Administrators
  • Edit Audience Members.
  • Editors and Contributors should be disabled (do not apply).

(plus) The Add Announcement control should be disabled (does not apply)

Create Topic

  • An administrator of the Announcements Portlet should have the option of selecting an external feed as a topic.
  • The topic definition might include the interval on which the feed should be refreshed.
  • Extensions to whether the audience is included in the feed