[cle-release-team] Proposal: Replace News tool with Simple RSS Portlet

[Matthew Jones]

Some of the motivation for replacing the News Tool with the News Feeds tool
was all of the features News Feeds provides. [1] I can't tell from the
screenshots if this tool provides any of these features, and the roadmap
ends so I can't tell if there's anyone going to work on features in the
future. So if not, what current advantages does this have over Sakai News?
(Which only has 2 open issues and seems low risk to leave as-is)

The highlight features for News Feeds were
- Aggregating multiple feeds from multiple sources
- Ability to define institutional feeds which users could just select and
subscribe to
- Improved caching
- 3 different views (detailed/titles/compact)

And would there be an easy conversion between Sakai News and this tool
(ideally a db conversion) if we decided to remove News so existing sites
wouldn't lose whatever RSS they were pointing to?

Thanks!

[1] https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/NFS/Features


On Thu, Nov 14, 2013 at 10:11 PM, Steve Swinsburg <steve.swinsburg at gmail.com
> wrote:

> *Proposal*
>
> 1. Remove News tool.
>
> 2. Add Simple RSS Portlet.
>
> *Rationale*
>
> The current News tool in Sakai is an ageing tool that has difficulty
> rendering some RSS feeds. In addition there is little community support for
> this tool [1].
>
> A contrib tool does exist called News Feeds which has previously been
> proposed as a replacement for the News tool [2]. However there are several
> issues with this tool:
> The main developer is no longer active in the Sakai community, having
> moved on several years ago [3];
> There are bugs which are unfixable using the current code due to libraries
> no longer existing [4];
> It uses a deprecated version of its UI framework and would require a major
> refactor to bring it up to date [ibid].
>
> Due to these issues, this tool is not appropriate for inclusion.
>
> Therefore, it is proposed that the News tool is replaced by the Simple RSS
> Portlet [5].
> The portlet was developed in 2011 and run as part of a number of
> university portals since its release.
>
> This tool renders all forms of RSS and Atom feeds and is completely
> configurable for both the instructor and user. The tool has been through a
> number of releases and is fully internationalised, supporting multiple
> languages out of the box.
>
> The portlet was originally designed to work within uPortal, however as
> Sakai is a JSR-168 compliant portlet container, it runs exactly the same as
> the new Web Content tool in trunk, which is also a JSR-168 portlet.
>
> The code for this portlet is currently on Github [6].
>
> The Simple RSS Portlet is developed and maintained by Steve Swinsburg.
>
> *Where to from here*
>
> Read the rationale above. A material objection (indicated by a -1 and
> accompany reasoning) raised by a Sakai PMC member will block this proposal.
>  Other opinions are welcome, indeed encouraged. Silence equals consent. Discussion
> should be on the sakai-dev list unless of a private nature in which case I
> am happy to correspond off list. Objections must be received before Friday
> 22nd November 2013.
>
> *Links*
> 1.
> https://jira.sakaiproject.org/issues/?jql=Project%20%3D%20%22Sakai%20CLE%22%20AND%20component%20in%20(%22News%20(RSS)%22%2C%20%22News%20Feeds%22)%20AND%20resolution%20in%20(%22No%20Resources%22%2C%20Unresolved%2C%20Incomplete)
> 2. https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/NFS/Home
> 3.
> http://collab.sakaiproject.org/pipermail/sakai-dev/2010-October/009813.html
> 4. https://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/NFS-61
> 5. https://wiki.jasig.org/display/PLT/Simple+RSS+Portlet
> 6. https://github.com/steveswinsburg/simple-rss-portlet
>
>
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>
>
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