News reader Enhancements
Thread Prefixes:
In the default News Reader install, a menu tab is created called News. Under that tab there is only one sub menu item called "All". basically they are the same thing whether you click the menu tab or the sub menu "All" link...ALL news items are displayed in the News Reader.
You can group your news feeds into categories, perhaps by source or by specific interest etc, and have those displayed as sub menu items so users can just view the rss news feeds from those sources.
Be careful though as creating too many Thread Prefixes for your News Reader will impact your sub menu list that is displayed under the News Reader menu tab.
Steps:
- In your Admin Control Panel -> Applications -> Thread Prefixes, create a new Thread Prefix Group.
- IMPORTANT...Make note of the Thread Prefix Group number. Do this by after creating your Thread Prefix Group, hover your mouse over the "Edit" link of the group and note the prefix_group_id number at the end of the link that is displayed at the bottom of your browser. It will show something like: MyDomain/admin.php?thread-prefixes/edit-group&prefix_group_id=1 (The number in this example is 1)
- Now create new Thread Prefixes making sure that:
- You select the Thread Prefix Group that you created in step 1 above, for your new Thread Prefix
- The Thread Prefix can be used in the forum where your rss news items are going to
- The Thread Prefix is as minimal number of characters as possible so you can have more categories displayed on the News Reader menu tab sub menu
- Now go to your rss news feeds Applications -> Registered Feeds, and for each of your rss news feeds, edit them with placing the desired Thread Prefix that you want those news items to have
- Finally, go to Home -> Options -> News Reader and in the "Prefix Group" box, enter the Thread Prefix Group number that you noted in Step 2 above and save
The end result will display on the sub menu under the News tab of your menu bar, "All" for all news items and each of the Thread Prefixes that you defined. A user can click "All" to see ALL news items or they can select one of the Thread Prefixes on the News tab sub menu to just display the news items from the rss news sources that you ass the Thread Prefix to.
Other:
Personally I find it much easier and more appealing to the user to create a Usergroup of rss news feed sources. For every news feed I create a user of the same name and then assign them to their incoming news feeds That way I can also only allow the News Reader Thread Prefixes to be used by that Usergroup...even though it is all automated anyway.
I also have all my news feeds going into the one "News" forum which I can choose to display in the Node List or not. If it isn't displayed in the forum node list then users get use to using the News Reader