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

[Steve Swinsburg]

The portlet is currently stable and unless more features are required,
there is no roadmap for those yet. As mentioned, I am the current developer
and maintainer of the portlet.

Feeds can be preconfigured in the portlet and they are cached.

Something I neglected to add in the original proposal is that media
enclosures are supported in the portlet, so things like podcast feeds
properly present the media attachments.

As for a conversion, portlets use the underlying database properties
system, so a conversion would be simple.

There is a large amount of work to do in bringing the News Feeds tool up to
date, hence the proposal.

cheers.


On Fri, Nov 15, 2013 at 2:28 PM, Matthew Jones <matthew at longsight.com>wrote:

> 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 The main developer is no longer active in the Sakai community, having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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