Silva News Network

Silva News Network is a news application and framework for Silva that can be used to turn websites into a sophisticated news publishing and aggregation network.

What is it?

Silva News Network provides a News & Events extension for Silva that runs out-of-the-box. It offers the capability to deploy multiple News Sources within an organization, say, in different departments, where some or all sources can be aggregated into a central news page. The different departments might have their own news page too. By adjusting SNN filters, editors can choose what target audiences and subjects their Aggregator collects, and have granular control of display down to an article level.

SNN Viewers can be used ‘as is’ for a news page, or be included inline into a document. Silva templates can display news feeds in a related column. Silva News Network has RSS extensions; a news Viewer can publish its contents as RSS. There is also an RSS Aggregator that can be used to pick up and display news from other SNN sources or external RSS and Atom feeds.

Features

Aggregation of news items into single news feeds from multiple news sources in a Silva site. Each news source can have its own contributors.
News filtering based on date, physical location, type and categories.
Agenda functionality: agenda items such as events can be planned in for dates, and a calendar interface is available for end users to browse through events.
Support for different content types for articles. Silva News Network can be extended to allow new article types.
Configurable news viewers. News items can be displayed in a single page with archive functionality, or as inline news items inside a Silva Document.
RSS export support: News viewers can expose their contents as RSS so that external aggregators can pick up on news published in a Silva site.
RSS/Atom import support: Silva News Network can connect to external RSS feeds and display them within a news viewer.
Partitioning of items.
Publishing workflow allowing news items to become available at future dates, expiry, and so on, integrated with Silva's publishing workflow.

In addition, SNN provides an extensible framework for building other sophisticated news-related applications.

Men ever had, and ever will have leave,
To coin new words well suited to the age,
Words are like Leaves, some wither every year,
And every year a younger Race succeeds.

—Horace, poet and satirist (65-8 BCE)

New functionality

Silva News Network is the new name for Silva News. We’ve changed the name to emphasize the extensive featureset and extensibility. For existing news users, the most important new features are:

Full support for editing news articles with the Kupu WYSIWYG editor.
Images can now be shown in news viewers.
More control over the location of items in news viewers.
Allows displaying dates in different locales in public views.
Allow explicit hiding or displaying the time part of dates.
Agenda items are now displayed by end date instead of begin date (if available).
Added title for subjects and target audiences. The title can be changed without breaking integrity.
Improved displaying of intros.
Removed HTML tables from public views to improve CSS styling possibilities.

For a full list of changes, see HISTORY.txt in the package.

Download

The package can be downloaded from http://infrae.com/download/SilvaNews.

The Silva website contains more information about how to report bugs, mailing lists, and related extensions.

Collaboration

Thanks to the University of Luton, University College London, Marc Petitmermet of ETH Zürich, Andrew Altepeter of Bethel University in St. Paul, USA, and the Bijvoet Center for Biomolecular Informatics for financial support.

Contact

FMI contact Kit Blake, kitblake at infrae com, +31 10 243 7051.