[OWW-Discuss] RSS is being improved.

[Bill F]

The XFeeds RSS feed reader (<XFeeds> extension tag) has been substantially
changed.

If you look in the MediaWiki:Monobook.css page, there's now a set of tags at
the bottom that start with OWWRSS. These tags control CSS styling of the
XFeeds RSS extension.

Jenny and I discussed doing this a while ago; Ricardo brought it up a few
weeks ago.

Today, Reshme, Barry, and Jason all thought it was a good day for the old
look of the RSS feed to die.

I pretty much rewrote the extension to turn the rather insular way in which
style tags were cryptically inserted to come up with the new version. It's
installed with default CSS I wrote.

My bad CSS is crying out to be improved.

Since the page used to modify the style is in the MediaWiki namespace, you
need to be a sysop to edit it. If you don't have access and have
suggestions, feel free to let me know what you would like to see. If there's
demand, we can come up with an alternate way to pass in CSS so that every
feed can have it's own CSS file.

The actual CSS file to be used is passed in as a parameter to the extension.
We can, in short, have multiple RSS styles. One of the parameters in the
extension now is "cssprefix". Just copy the existing OWWRSS tags and rename
them to the same name as the value you set cssprefix to.

As an example:

Currently the relevant CSS tags start with OWWRSS. The cssprefix for the
front page passed to the extension is "OWWRSS". To make another one:

1. Copy the OWWRSS tags. (please don't delete the current OWWRSS tags....
the whole world is watching!)
2. Come up with a new prefix. Example: NEWSRSS.
3. Change the copy of the current tags to start with NEWSRSS.
4. Modify the CSS for each part of the RSS display (more on that in a
detailed document).
5. Save the new tags to your own User:Name/Monobook.css file for testing.
6. Do what you need to make them look cool. (rad, hip, with-it, out of
sight, mad....).
7. When it looks cooked, then save the tags you created in the Monobook.css
file.
8. Make sure you have set the cssprefix to NEWSRSS.
9. Save a page with the XFeeds extension tag on it.
10. Let all of us see how it looks.

I've also made a few other changes.

1. There's a new tag that allows you to limit the length of the text to be
displayed. The default is now 200 characters I think. As I said, I'm working
on a detail doc.
2. I've added a function to trim the prorate so that no more double empty
lines will appear as they did in the past.
3. I've added a paragraph truncate which will display the text up to the end
of the last sentence that can be displayed. Run-on sentences will not be
handled all that well. Alas poor James Joyce... Ulysses won't make it.
4. If you want to continue to use the existing tags to XFeeds, they all
still work. But the external CSS is the best way to go.


I'm also fixing the title display so that you can have the extension only
display the title text rather than also displaying the description. For some
use of the extension, this will make a lot of sense. For example, that list
of new users on the front page can now be slickly styled into something
marginally easy on the eyes.

If anyone has other suggestions, please let me know.

The extension is now online and is begging to be styled.

Thanks

Bill
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