CMFSin tutorial

CMFSin is a simple solution that enables one site to display the feed from other website in real time with no storage facilities. Usually it is sufficient.

CMFSin has two parts that make it too different (and unusual) from other Plone products:

1. It uses text-based configuration
2. It exposes nonstandard way of displaying RSS data in portlets.

How to configure CMFSin by ZMI

After installation of CMFSin product you get sin_tool object inside your Plone instance. Usually it is configured via ZMI. Go to the ZMI interface and find sin_tool there or login directly to

http://MyPloneWebsiteURL/sin_tool/manage_configForm

If you go to sin_tool in ZMI or NewsFeeds tab/action in Plone you'll see the configuration. When configuring CMFSin there is two concepts, channels and maps. Channel is URL of RSS feed, map is collection of one or more channels. Channels are in the [channels] section of configuration, maps in [maps]. CMFSin has a number of channels preconfigured, you most probably would add more of them. Thus syntax is:

default configuration offers a lot of examples. <time> is channel polling frequency in hours, days, weeks, months or years. For example:

4webresults=33h:http://4webresults.com/blog/RSS
Your channel will be polled each 33rd hour.

4webresults=1d:http://4webresults.com/blog/RSS
Your channel will be polled once a day.

The maps has the syntax:

<mapid>=[<policy>:]<channel>[,<channel>]*

Where the policy is one of the 'simple' (default) and 'random'. The policy explains how items will be ordered from the specified channels when being displayed. Simple says that channels will follow each other. Random makes more sense for feeds with numerous entries.

For example you can announce 2 channels

[channels] seonews=1d:http://4webresults.com/blog/RSS ploneproducts=1d:http://www.contentmanagementsoftware.info/plone/RSS2

If you want to preview items in random order write the following

[maps] myfeeds=random:seonews,ploneproducts

If you want to preview ploneproducts items after seonews please write the following

[maps] myfeeds=seonews,ploneproducts

After forming the map it is time to display them. CMFSin offers several ways of displaying the syndicated data. The simplest is to add the sin_tool portlet to left_slots or right_slots properties of the Plone site instance (or any other folder/document). The syntax of the portlet string is:

portal/sin_tool/macros/<mapname>

For example it can be

portal/sin_tool/macros/myfeeds

Go to the ZMI http://MyPloneWebsiteURL/manage
Select Propeties tab

myfeeds will be available in the list of left portlets.

That's it. Nothing more. However this way has several drawbacks, for instance you have no control over how the portlet looks. More advanced ways are offered in portal_skins/sin/rss_slot, which shows how to control verbosity, size of portlet and mapname.

Default CMFSin templates has no possibility to alter the portlet title. It is equal to map name. To have it customized, it is necessary to customize the templates used.

How to enable CMFSin Plone configuration.

After installation of CMFSin product you get sin_tool object inside your Plone instance. Usually it is configured via ZMI, but it has Plone interface either, however it is hidden by default. To make the cmf_sin configuration show up somewhere in Plone you should go to ZMI -> plone instance -> cmf_sin -> Actions.

There is an action described already, but hidden. You should make it visible, and you can change the Category to user_actions if necessary.

Note: We recommend you to use ZMI to config CMFSin because of few bugs noticed.