News Plugin 📰

[xgp (Garth)]

Looks like it works with 3.0.5 if I use the sha just before that commit. (289c736c65841578ac9022923581828f089fccac) Thanks for all of your help @merefield

Do you know if it’s possible to make the News page the default/home page?

[merefield (Robert)]

You could use the theme api, or simply install this:

Allow Arbitrary Homepage (by Jay Pfaffman)

Well, @hellekin thought that this deserved its own topic. I’m not quite sure it’s ready for such, but here it is. I’ll have a look at stuff early next week and try to make sure that it looks like something that other people could really use. As he said:

and set it to /news

[seyuf]

Hi there, i don’t know why? But i’m having trouble with this plugin since 3 discourse update ago.
I get :
Error while processing route: news Cannot read properties of undefined (reading 'can_create_topic') TypeError: Cannot read properties of undefined (reading 'can_create_topic')

Full details in the issue on github repo.
Any help will be much appreciated.

[seyuf]

Anybody to help ?

[angus (Angus McLeod)]

Sorry, I’m a bit too busy right now. There have been a few changes in Discourse that have affected this plugin (moving it to broken for now). Ping me again in a week or so. I might have some more time.

[Thomas_Rother (Thommie Rother)]

Question for @angus on the GitHub - paviliondev/discourse-news: Adds a news stream to your Discourse instance plugin (before digging into the code myself - I am not an UX specialist …)

I dont understand the required syntax in the entry fields for

discourse news rss and discourse news icon

For the news icon, I played with the code examples from

Introducing Font Awesome 5 and SVG icons

We will shortly merge into master a branch that upgrades Discourse to Font Awesome 5.5.0 (the free version) and switches to using SVG icons instead of an icon font. This is a substantial change, with lots of benefits, and one significant change for developers. Here is a quick rundown of the changes: using SVG icons will provide crisper icons, better for accessibility and easier to customize, see this Github article for more details since the Font Awesome icon set has grown to 1300+ icons in v…

but without success for “fa-newspaper” yet …

[JammyDodger]

As it’s a third-party plugin, I’ve slipped your post over to the relevant plugin topic.

Though it looks like this one has the broken tag at the minute (not sure if that affects your issue though).

[angus (Angus McLeod)]

Hey @Thomas_Rother. If you can get this plugin to work for you (caveat it seems to be broken for some as @JammyDodger mentioned), then there’s two lists of fontawesome icons in Discourse which will give you the exact name you need to use.

There’s this one, which is the one that Discourse loads by default (i.e. will always work if you just use the right name)

discourse/discourse/blob/main/lib/svg_sprite.rb#L6

And there’s icons in the Fontawesome SVGs in Discourse (The name is the id on the symbol). The icons in the SVG which are not listed in lib/svg_sprite.rb will work if they’re loaded by a plugin or theme.

So for fa-newspaper, it looks like:

1. It’s not in the list in lib/svg_sprite.rb meaning that Discourse does not load it by default;
2. There is a newspaper in the fontawesome/regular.svg and fontawesome/solid.svg

So to use it in the News plugin you’d need to load newspaper in a theme or plugin following the steps laid out in

Introducing Font Awesome 5 and SVG icons

We will shortly merge into master a branch that upgrades Discourse to Font Awesome 5.5.0 (the free version) and switches to using SVG icons instead of an icon font. This is a substantial change, with lots of benefits, and one significant change for developers. Here is a quick rundown of the changes: using SVG icons will provide crisper icons, better for accessibility and easier to customize, see this Github article for more details since the Font Awesome icon set has grown to 1300+ icons in v…

[seyuf]

Thanks for the reply and for this very useful plugin.
It would be nice to have a fix someday.
I understand it may be linked to this ? DEV: Refactor discovery routes to remove use of 'named outlets' (#22622) · discourse/discourse@82d6d69 · GitHub
Hopefully, someone versed in discourse can help.
Bests

[nolo (Manuel)]

@angus

So to use it in the News plugin you’d need to load newspaper in a theme or plugin following the steps laid out in

As an aside, won’t it do to just add it to svg icon subset in admin/settings ?

[hemes (Brett Hemes)]

I found this plugin and it looks very interesting and most likely will accomplish exactly what I am looking for. After a bit I noticed the broken tag. Can this still (safely) be installed?

[nathank (Nathan Kershaw)]

In short, no. But the coop.pavilion.tech developers would likely be willing to get it working + maintain it if you have a budget.

Alternatively, you can achieve something very similar using Topic List Previews (and maybe Sidebar Blocks).

[Steve_John]

Even I am looking forward for this news plugin fix to utilize this nice feature.

[BCHK (Bcguy)]

@Angus how much$ and time would it cost to get this plugin updated to work with the current version of Discourse? And with infinite scroll for the main news feed.

I’m potentially interested in getting this updated.

I’ve been using it for the past 3 years (and its generally great, obviously with some limitations), but I’m currently stuck on the following version of Discourse: 2.9.0.beta9

and would like to move to the latest version of Discourse.

[angus (Angus McLeod)]

@BCHK

I’ve been using it for the past 3 years (and its generally great, obviously with some limitations)

Glad to hear it!

For me to work on this now it’d be at least $1k, possibly a bit more. Because:

• I’d take time from other work.
• I’d have to write tests for it.
• it hasn’t been updated in a while.

So if that’s in budget shoot me a PM and I’ll give you a proper quote

Alternatively, if you can get at least five real communities that currently use it to reach out, I’ll do it for free in my spare time (the “community interest” option).

[MarkB2 (Mark)]

Hi
Are there any instructions as such in terms of how to set this up?

I have installed the plugin, enabled the plugin, selected Discourse news to be enabled, completed all the mandatory fields (using BBC rss feed as a test) and I do not see anything against the Discourse News Category

[Jagster (Jakke Lehtonen)]

Well, it is tagged as broken. Perhaps you should not waste time with it?

[BCHK (Bcguy)]

@angus

Alternatively, if you can get at least five real communities that currently use it to reach out, I’ll do it for free in my spare time (the “community interest” option).

Is there anyone else interested in using this News plugin (I love it and have built a site around it) and would be interested in having it updated to run on the latest version of Discourse?

Please add a comment here if you’re interested, or reach out to me.