News Plugin 📰

[dashcam_journals (dashcam journals PH)]

Follow the steps here and pull from this link GitHub - paviliondev/discourse-news: Adds a news stream to your Discourse instance

Install Plugins in Discourse

This guide assumes that you have a self-hosted standard installation. We only support the standard method of install here, so these instructions assume you have a standard install. This guide only applies to self-hosted Discourse instances. If you are using a managed hosting service, the available plugins are controlled by your hosting provider. For example, on our hosting these specific plugins are available by hosting tier. In this tutorial, we’ll install the Discours…

[Pravi (PK)]

Is it possible to add multiple feeds from different sources. It seems like we can add only one XML from only one source.

[angus (Angus McLeod)]

Hey @Pravi, thanks for using the plugin.

No, it is not currently possible to add multiple feeds.

[Pravi (PK)]

Any future update on multiple feeds?

[BCHK (Bcguy)]

Hi,

I’ve got the Pavilion News plugin in my new discourse install - and I’m testing it out with posts and users and have run into a number of issues that I’m wondering if other News plugin users might have found a work around for?

Load times for home page?
Is there any way to control the number of news posts that are initially downloaded when a person, anonymous user comes to the site? It seems that it downloads the entire news section (every single post) at once - which seems crazy. As I’ve added News items to fill up the site a bit, load times for the home page have dramatically increased. When I just had a post or two load times were in the 200 ms range - but now with 10 or 15 posts the load time is up to 1500ms.

Stripped out images from the news posts?
Other than the top most image, any images that are in the post seem to be stripped out of the post so that when people read the /news feed the can’t see any of the images that the text in the body refers to. Very strange…

Embedded Videos - Don’t play, replaced by static image, with link to YouTube - thus side-stepping the embedded video ability. Takes the people off the site - which basically remove a feature from discourse.

Any suggestions appreciated!

[Jagster (Jakke Lehtonen)]

@BCHK

Don’t play, replaced by static image, with link to YouTube

Sorry, this isn’t a solution, but those should just lazy load and show a static image before playing.

[merefield (Robert)]

The basic concept here is that the News Plugin sits at and enhances a Topic List view of either a list of topics or RSS feed.

Thus the “per-Topic” view is simpler than a single Topic view would be expected to be, but richer than the default, image-less “venetian blind” format of a regular Discourse Topic List.

@BCHK

Stripped out images from the news posts?
Other than the top most image, any images that are in the post seem to be stripped out of the post so that when people read the /news feed the can’t see any of the images that the text in the body refers to. Very strange…

This is expected and a practical compromise.

• the plugin’s primary focus is RSS feeds and supports one featured image per “post”, however, it can also show an image from a Discourse Topic.

• If you want to see the other images you can navigate to the full Topic.

• this is partly to ensure performance is reasonable. To show all images from all Topics would be a large download.

• This also keeps the layout more compact.

@BCHK

Embedded Videos - Don’t play, replaced by static image, with link to YouTube - thus side-stepping the embedded video ability. Takes the people off the site - which basically remove a feature from discourse.

• Same goes for embedded videos on Topics, these are just presented as a thumbnail on the news feed, just like they would be on all equivalent plugins and theme components that display on the Topic List.

@BCHK

When I just had a post or two load times were in the 200 ms range - but now with 10 or 15 posts the load time is up to 1500ms.

Is this for RSS or Discourse Category based feeds? If the latter there may be some performance enhancement potential by sourcing a low resolution thumbnail instead of the full sized image and applying lazy loading … however given the size of the laid out image a low resolution image might not cut the mustard.

If your interest is not in RSS feeds then you might also want to check out Topic List Previews TC which is a bit more optimised for that task, but has a different flavour of layout.

[BCHK (Bcguy)]

Hi Rober - thanks for the explanation. This is not for an rss type application - this is for more of a blog + forum application. I wanted to avoid the hassles and overhead of having both a Wordpress site and the discourse forum since its a small side project for me.

How do you apply “lazy loading” - I’m not a coder, and not familiar with that setting.

Thanks for your info.

[merefield (Robert)]

That’s a feature request.

[Jagster (Jakke Lehtonen)]

@BCHK

How do you apply “lazy loading”

You can’t. But it is a feature that should be in use nowadays anyway. So, hopefully devs of Discourse come to modern time

(No, I don’t know how difficult it would be, but nearly every other platforms use it, and for reason)

[merefield (Robert)]

Actually, it’s a fairly trivial change that doesn’t need to involve the Discourse team, which I’ve gone ahead and made:

IMPROVE: rename raw templates and add lazy loading for thumbnail · paviliondev/discourse-news@6150851 (github.com)

I’ve also deployed a set of fixes for breaking changes and modernised the template suffixes:

COMPATIBILITY: settings references · paviliondev/discourse-news@dcda6a7 (github.com)

@angus

[flash]

Hi, I just installed the plugin and its a new site is running default theme. The images are all off the screen on both mobile and desktop. Is there a fix for this?

[angus (Angus McLeod)]

Hey, could you share what your “discourse news source” is? If it’s a category, then images are working as expected (see here).

If it’s an RSS feed, image support will depend on what the version of the feed is. If it’s RSS 1.x, there is no official image support in the RSS 1.x specification(s), so the plugin does not support images in those feeds.

If it’s RSS 2.0, then image support is provided via the enclosure tag. The feed items will need an attribute like this:

<enclosure url="http://feed.com/image.jpg" length="12345" type="image/jpeg"/>

See further:
https://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification#ltenclosuregtSubelementOfLtitemgt

[flash]

Hi. Yes it was this feed link

https://cointelegraph.com/rss/tag/altcoin

[angus (Angus McLeod)]

The good news is that that Feed is RSS 2.0 and does in fact have images in an enclosure tag. As such, they show up as expected.

I’ve loaded the feed on try.thepavilion.io/news as an example. Please make sure you have the following site settings:

• discourse news enabled: true
• discourse news source: RSS
• discourse news rss: https://cointelegraph.com/rss/tag/altcoin

[Oni]

Is it possible to tag a post as News so the news is from this certain post in a topic ?

Better explaination: In our forum, members regularily posts news and I’d like to apply a news tag to this post to make a news.

[angus (Angus McLeod)]

The plugin currently supports using a category for the news source, but not tags.

[merefield (Robert)]

Just to point out that Tags are not Post concepts, they are Topic level, so what you are asking for is challenging in any case.

[Oni]

That’s what I was thinking as I was typing…

Is there a way to identify a post, apart from the post id, to extract these posts ?

[flash]

I have those settings on. And on default theme with topic previews plugin as well. This is what I see.