How to structure your RSS feeds from timelines and a storefront

It is common for a Pugpig App to contain a combination of editions on a storefront tab, and rolling content on other timelines. This document summarises our recommended way for you to structure your RSS feeds to power this. It is also relevant for apps without a storefront but an article can appear in multiple timelines.

The types of collections we generate are normally:

• A set a edition collections. These are normally ordered by page number or page rank, which should be supplied in the feed
• A set of curated article timelines (for example a Home Tab or Latest News) - these should each have their own RSS feed, and the timelines normally contain the exact set of articles in the feed, ordered by feed order
• A set of automatic article timelines - these normally show a fixed number of articles (ideally around 50) and ordered by recency. These do not need a dedicated set of feeds
• Timelines of unique content types - for example a Podcast Timeline or an Event Timeline. These should normally be provided as their own RSS feeds like the curated article timelines. They'll often have unique entries, e.g. a start time for an event or a duration for a podcast.

A typical entry for an article that can appear in editions and timelines should look something like this:

<item>
	<title>This is an article in editions and timelines</title>
	<link>https://www.amce.com/artlicle.html</link>
	<description><![CDATA[It's amazing how easily we can put an article in multiple places]]></description>
	<category><![CDATA[Cricket]]></category>
	<category><![CDATA[Rugby]]></category>
	<pubDate>Wed, 20 Oct 2021 17:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
	<updated>Wed, 20 Oct 2021 10:45:53 +0000</updated>
	<guid isPermaLink="false">1234567890</guid>
	<content:encoded><![CDATA[
	  Content in HTML with <b>tags</b> and inline images etc
	]]></content:encoded>

Include this if it is in an edition:

	<pugpig:edition>3357</pugpig:edition>
	<pugpig:page>55</pugpig:page>

Include this if it is on one or more timelines:

	<timeline>Home</timeline>
	<timeline>News</timeline>

We can also support treating the editions and timelines as the same things, like in the example below:

	<pugpig:page>55</pugpig:page>
	<collection>3357</collection>

Include this if it is on one or more timelines:

	<collection>Home</collection>
	<collection>News</collection>

This example assumes that the "widget" display for the article will be the same on both the Home and News timeline is the same. If the article should be styled differently in different contexts, then more information is needed which should be discussed on a call.

Note: It is important that if an article appears in multiple RSS feeds, we expect the entry in each feed to be identical. This means that the order in which we process feeds doesn't matter, and updating one feed won't steal content from a different one 

Edition Meta Data

In this model, you will still need to manually create your editions in the CMS, and upload covers and other meta data. If you want to power this from a separate RSS feed, see Pugpig RSS Edition & Timeline Feed Specification.

Polling frequency

You can control how often we hit your server by including the RSS Syndication Module tags:
https://web.resource.org/rss/1.0/modules/syndication/

For example, an edition feed could be checked every few hours, while Latest News maybe every 5 or 10 minutes.

    <sy:updatePeriod>hourly</sy:updatePeriod>
    <sy:updateFrequency>1</sy:updateFrequency>