News Plugin v1.4

The News plugin implements a simple "Headlines" view, or summary, of a list of news or a weblog. One enters news as items of a bulleted list in a single topic, most recent first. If somewhere in the topic, the keyword %NEWS% appears, then a new topic is created (by default of the name of the topic with Headlines appended) with the first line of the 5 more recent news. Ending punctuation is removed from the headlines for a sleeker look.

Recommended usage is to INCLUDE this generated topic in some panel in a front page, and put a "More..." link in it to the original MyCompanyNews topic. The %NEWS% variable can be set in an HTML comment:
<!-- %NEWS% -->

It needs a TWiki version of 01 Feb 2003 or better, or the 01 Dec 2001 version with the TWiki:Codev/PluginHookOnSavePatch patch.

See http://koala.ilog.fr/wiki/bin/view/Plugins/NewsPluginExampleInclusion

Syntax Rules

Add a %NEWS% variable in a news topic named Xxx to generate a headline topic named XxxHeadlines.

To change the default, use the syntax %NEWS{parameter="value" ...}% syntax with the following available parameters:

Parameter	Value
count	The number of headlines to keep. Defaults to 5.
prefix	This text will be prepended to the generated topic. Defaults to nothing.
suffix	This text will be appended to the generated topic. Defaults to nothing.
presep	Prepend each headline with this text. Defaults to <tab>*<space>
postsep	Appends this text to each headline. Defaults to newline
trim	If set to "no", trailings punctuation marks ( .,:; ) are note removed from headlines. defaults to "yes"

Example: %NEWS{presep="<li>" prefix="<ul>" suffix="</ul>"}%

Examples

Example: If the topic MyCompanyNews contains:

%NEWS%
 * News Plugin released - 18 Feb 2003.
   The great news plugin has been debugged
 * News Plugin devel started - 02 Jan 2003.
   I think this is really needed, 
   I will try to keep it simple

Then on saving the topic MyCompanyNewsHeadlines will contain:

 * News Plugin released - 18 Feb 2003
 * News Plugin devel started - 02 Jan 2003

News Plugin Global Settings

Plugin settings are stored as preferences variables. To reference a plugin setting write %<plugin>_<setting>%, i.e. %INTERWIKIPLUGIN_SHORTDESCRIPTION%

• One line description, is shown in the TextFormattingRules topic:
  • Set SHORTDESCRIPTION = %NEWS% generates a short headlines topic from a list of news

• Debug plugin: (See output in data/debug.txt)
  • Set DEBUG = 0

Plugin Installation Instructions

Note: You do not need to install anything on the browser to use this plugin. The following instructions are for the administrator who installs the plugin on the server where TWiki is running.

• Download the ZIP file from the Plugin web (see below)
• Unzip NewsPlugin.zip in your twiki installation directory. Content:

  File:	Description:
  data/TWiki/NewsPlugin.txt	Plugin topic
  data/TWiki/NewsPlugin.txt,v	Plugin topic repository
  lib/TWiki/Plugins/NewsPlugin.pm	Plugin Perl module

• Test if the installation was successful:
  • see News Plugin Example

Plugin Info

Plugin Author:	TWiki:Main/ColasNahaboo
Plugin Version:	17 Feb 2003 (V1.000)
Change History:
20 Feb 2003	1.4 trim option for removing ending punctuation: . , : ;
19 Feb 2003	1.3 small bugfix
17 Feb 2003	1.2 Initial version
CPAN Dependencies:	none
Other Dependencies:	none
Perl Version:	5.005
Plugin Home:	http://TWiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Plugins/NewsPlugin
Feedback:	http://TWiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Plugins/NewsPluginDev

Related Topics: TWikiPreferences, TWikiPlugins

-- TWiki:Main/ColasNahaboo - 17 Feb 2003