Closed Bug 493099 Opened 15 years ago Closed 15 years ago

Hook up news feeds on new www.mozilla.org home page

Categories

(www.mozilla.org :: General, defect)

defect
Not set
normal

Tracking

(Not tracked)

RESOLVED FIXED

People

(Reporter: davidwboswell, Assigned: bugzilla)

References

()

Details

Attachments

(3 files)

There are two news feeds on the new www.mozilla.org home page that need to get set up:

- Latest news from Mozilla: This will mostly use the about:mozilla newsletter feed although we'd like be able to post other news items as needed.  Since this will be low volume the feed doesn't need to be dynamic.

https://developer.mozilla.org/devnews/index.php/feed/atom/

- Community Ticker: This will pull from the Lizard Feeder and ideally it will update in real-time without people needing to reload.  The idea is to give people a hint of the community's activities without overloading them.

http://feeds.mozilla.com/
Some more detailed thinking about the feeds is on the wiki at

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mozilla.org/Design_Implementation/RSS
For the Latest news from Mozilla section, to be able to add additional news as needed I guess that means pulling in two feeds.  The second feed could be the Mozilla Foundation blog.  I don't think we'd want to whole blog feed though, so maybe just one category (or posts tagged as 'news' or something).

http://blog.mozillafoundation.org/
Assignee: nobody → bugzilla
Overall implementation ideas:
a) Use a cron-job to generate static html with the news items
b) Pull in the items from a (db-based) cache, refresh the cache occasionally

From the libraries available, I'd choose either SimplePie or Zend
Framework. Especially SimplePie seems to do most of the things we need
out of the box. We would only need a little wrapper script. The only
drawback is that its cache is file based, but we could overload the
caching class with our own and use a DB backend for the cache.

Thoughts?
I prefer option A. When working on this, be sure there is one file we can update to add or remove feeds from. Checking in changes to SVN should make the static html update with any feed changes the next time the cron runs.
First take on it. See README section inside the file for usage instructions.

Depending on how much we trust people, we might want to do some more sanity checks on the target file option. Also, it might be a good idea to check for errors with the feed before writing to the file.
Sample configuration file for the feed parser.
Screenshot of home page with generated html
Great, glad to see the script working in the screenshot.  It looks like there will be some tweaks to make later (like adding the date to the Latest news posts and the right favicons in the community ticker) but for now let's ask Reed to review what you've posted and go from there.
Attachment #378358 - Flags: review?(reed)
Attachment #378359 - Flags: review?(reed)
Attachment #378358 - Attachment mime type: application/x-httpd-php → text/plain
OS: Mac OS X → All
Hardware: x86 → All
The feed at the lizard-feeder site (http://feeds.mozilla.com/archives/index.xml) seems to be broken - or only shows a few items at a time. Should the Community Ticker on the home page be using everything that goes into Lizard Feeder, or some sub-set, and if it is a sub-set, what is it?
The ticker was designed to just be everything from the lizardfeeder.
CC'ing lorchard to answer this question:

Why does the lizard-feeder feed only show a few items? http://feeds.mozilla.com/archives/index.xml

Thanks.
(In reply to comment #11)
> Why does the lizard-feeder feed only show a few items?

It shows 16, which is about the usual for RSS/Atom feeds.  How many were you expecting?
(In reply to comment #12)
> It shows 16, which is about the usual for RSS/Atom feeds.  How many were you
> expecting?

So it does. That's plenty. We were seeing one or two items in it earlier this morning.
Hmm.  I haven't looked at lizardfeeder in a few months, but now that I think about it, the number is actually variable.  It accumulates them every 10 minutes, archives the feed, and then fills up again.
Is there an existing page cache already running on the site? If so, how will the caching mechanisms discussed above mesh with it?
The script does not cache at the moment. We are generating HTML source every n minutes (triggered by a cron job), which is then included by the main site.
That said, if there is any caching going on at the main site (I have no idea about that), we need to make sure that the home page is not cached longer than n minutes (or a multiple of it).
Patrick, I committed a cleaned-up version of the cron-job parser you attached above in r49699. Thanks for the help!
Status: NEW → RESOLVED
Closed: 15 years ago
Resolution: --- → FIXED
Attachment #378358 - Flags: review?(reed)
Attachment #378359 - Flags: review?(reed)
Component: www.mozilla.org → General
Product: Websites → www.mozilla.org
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