Ok guys, I have an assignment that I have to finish by monday preferably. I need to have a RSS feed page that would display RSS feeds from like 8-10 sources and then I have to randomly pick like 3 of them and place them on home page or sth else.

I have been looking at some links here:

http://www.silverstripe.org/customising-the-cms/show/11548
http://www.silverstripe.org/general-questions/show/9594?start=0

to name a few, and also been trying to figure out some modules like SS_RSS_Feed_Manager and RSS connector.
I am trying to make some sense out of this, but could use some help.

Since I'm kinda new to SS and PHP I would bee grateful if you could assist me in a best way to do this.
I have precious little time to complete this so I can't try out all the options before me, so mby if you could point me in right direction, if not provide me with a solution

What part are you stuck on?

Hi,

ok, not sure if this was the best approach, but it seamed the easiest. I was going through modules uploaded on the SS site, and I decided to use one of them. First I tried SS RSS Feed Manager, but I couldn't figure it out, still trying though.

Next I installed filesystem, external connector and then RSS connector. Now this seems to give some results, but with many errors - first, I used one "Page" type page and turned it into a "External content page". Next I went to "External content" tab in SS CMS. Then created new connector of "RSS content source" type. OK, so now I entered name "Packet storm" , link "http://rss.packetstormsecurity.org/files/", went to Advance tab... nothing there to change. Next was Import tab:
Page to import: (the one i made "External content" type)
check Include selected item and child items in import
check Overwrite imports
I did that, and clicked save, it says Javascript Parse Error.

Now, this is where interesting things start to happen. First there is nothing... then when I change tab in SS CMS and return to "External content" tab there is a RSS connector with many RSS feeds in it's tree, and I get some more options. I try using them, pust "start import", every save ends up with Javascript Parse Error... Anyways I go to the page I wanted to import them to (in CMS) and select a source - i select "Packet Storm" - so this part works.
When I then go to the page I wanted to import them to (so not in CMS, but on the page www.example.com/ss/page/) there they are when I refresh the site.
If I return to homepage and the use the navbar to access the page with RSS feeds it redirects me to www.example.com/ss/extcon/view/11 and displays error. The error says sth like: "Template not found for 11".

Not sure why is this happening... I feel I'm rly close, but I can't understand what is happening...
If I manually enter www.example.com/ss/page then it redirects me to the page with RSS feeds and displays them, but the navbar is redirecting me to www.example.com/ss/extcon/view/11 and displays error every time...

Help guys plz. Is not THAT urgent cause at my workplace I already showed to my tutor (I'm an intern) what is going on and he accepts that I did what he asked me to up to a point in kinda short time, but there is some bug that needs to be fixed that is probably not of my own doing. Still I do have to fix it and make it work as intended.

OK, I have found a different way to display RSS feeds by using blog RSS widget. I simply made a new page type called "RSSFeeds" and placed a widget area called "rssfeeds" in its controller (following tutorial). Then I simply added a few RSS feed widgets (dragging them and filling in the url's - simple enough and quite elegant solution if I might add, for a newbie like myself)
That worked like a charm, I now have an RSS feed page that displays RSS feeds from a couple of different sources. Even links work and it is displayed nicely across the whole page.
The only problem now is the second part of my task that says I need to be able to pull 2-3 random feeds from my RSSFeeds site onto my HomePage. Now this is where it starts being tricky since I can't find a method of controlling it (<% control .... %>) or sth so I could pull some information from that pages widget area.

Any ideas?

this module by me will be a help ?

https://github.com/fonsekaean/SilverStripe_RSS_Feed_Manager

You know I rly think it would help me a lot and solve all my problems if I could only figure out how to set it up and use it...

I would like to use ur module... I can see some interesting widgets you made as well. I can see that u're an active programmer that post a lot of useful stuff here and some of it did help me, but some of them, like RSS feed manager, lack a proper documentation. Mby it is only me, but I'm almost sure that there are others that would like to use some stuff posted here but don't have the knowledge to figure it out by themselves.

Now I can see that rss feed manager makes new database inputs - stores some data there... but i don't see how it is connected with rss feed cause it doesn't ask me for an URL input. Another thing, i don't know with which page type I should associate it with? You said I should make an RSS feed in sites root, how? Where? Could you pls be more specific? If it is not a problem make it urself and post it here?

I agree, true, I dont have much time to product documentation for all this, sometimes if you feel like to contribute welcome for that :)

anyway when you install the RSS Feed manager you will get a new Tab in the CMS, where Pages, Assets are..

now you can go to the tab, and then create RSS feeds, this is just another use of the SilverStripe model admin, So basically what you have to do is to create a new feed, select a dataobject this is what you want to have in your RSS feed,

if you want to have blogentries this will be BlogEntry then you can assign RSS options, like Title of a post, this will be the BlogEntry->MenuTitle I think, and then once you save the module will register the RSS feed as a <link /> tag.

do you understand this?

Anyway if you still have problems please dont hesitate to email me or skype me. you can find those info in my forum profile :)

cheers

Easy tool for RSS Feeds! Try it here http://www.submit-rss.com/download.html ! :)