Ticket #9550 (closed PLIP: wontfix)
Improved Inbound Feed Syndication
Reported by: | dukebody | Owned by: | |
---|---|---|---|
Priority: | minor | Milestone: | Future |
Component: | General | Version: | |
Keywords: | Cc: |
Description
http://plone.org/products/plone/roadmap/137
Consolidate on a single, intuitive, inbound feed syndication UI and paradigm
Proposed by
Jonah Bossewitch
Seconded by
Nate Aune
Proposal type
User interface
State
being-discussed
Definitions
Existing inbound syndication Products:
- feedfeeder (Rocky Burt)
- ClearRSS (Andy McKay)
- CMFSin
- CMFFeed
- CMFContentPanels
- PloneRSS
- fatsyndication
- PodChannels
Motivation
In the mashed-up, distributed, decoupled web 2.0 world, RSS is arguably functioning as the duct tape of the web. More and more services are exposing their data and services over RSS, and we should have better tools to integrate this content into plone sites.
While RSS is only used explicitly by < 4% of internet users, it is becoming a very important tool for developers, perhaps as important as CGI was in its day.
We need look no further than planet plone to see how improved inbound feed syndication could serve the Plone platform. In fact, multiple inbound feed solutions exist in the plone world - we need to centralize and consolidate these tools and offer a singular, powerful inbound aggregation story.
In an environment where live searches, and REST apis are exposing their results as RSS, entire applications can now be stitched together from a hodge-podge of backends. This is more than automatically updated news feeds. We can imagine backing a photo album with flickr itself, or distributed research with a tool like delicious. We can imagine collaborative content contribution models more similar to darcs than svn.
Other CMS platforms serving similar constituencies have powerful inbound RSS features built into the core - not in iteslf a good reason to follow, but something to track and consider: drupal aggregator .
See the "Subscribing to RSS feeds from Plone" section from the Snow Sprint's topic page for more details http://plone.org/events/sprints/snow-sprint3/syndication
Proposal
In many respects the hardest issue to contend with when it comes to inbound rss syndication is a UI one.
I propose to extend the 'smart folder' metaphor and create 'remote smart folders' (in spite of my recent questioning of the entire folder metaphor, I imagine it will still be around and useful for a while).
These folders can be backed by any of our syndication tools. The will allow content creators to define inbound rss feeds w/in the Plone ui - not as portlets, but as first class content.
Remote smart folders can work like bloglines folders. They can aggregate sub-folders feeds into a single feed. The top level folders can define aggregation and filtering policies.
I think that one of the issues that has held up RSS syndication is the question of whether or not syndicated content ever needs to end up in the zodb. I don't think it does, if you have good enough control over filters so that moderation can happen differerently. Also consider that some of the applications powering these feeds might also allow for control of this content, so that workflows can be accomplished by controlling an account on the 'provider' end.
Search integration is something that needs to be considered, but in my mind what needs to be resolved is a firm committment to the importance of inbound RSS syndication and a good UI metaphor for pulling it into Plone.
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