Note: I no longer work for iServices, but they kindly asked me to release an updated version. They owe me a pizza for this.
Rationale
I wanted to embed RSS feeds directly into Plone and Products.Collage, but I
did not want to store the entries in the ZODB. However, I could not find any
suitable product for that task. I did not search very hard anyway. So I ended
up cooking 2 products: iservices.rssdocument and
collective.collage.rssdocument.
What does it do?
iservices.rssdocument provides a RSSDocument content-type. This
RSSDocument needs two things (well, three): a title, the URL of the RSS from
which you want to retrieve data from, and the number of entries to display.
With that data in place, it will use a jQuery plugin from http://www.zazar.net/developers/jquery/zrssfeed/ which uses Google's AJAX Feed API to parse the RSS or ATOM and get JSON data of the parsed feed and finally embed it into Plone. There is no interaction with the ZODB apart from retrieving the URL, title, description and number of entries to display. So, its speed and reliability depend upon external factors to Plone.
collective.collage.rssdocument reuses rssdocument into a Collage. So this
is an add-on that allows me to do that. It only provides the "standard" view
for the collage. That's just exactly what I needed for my purposes.
Where do I get it?
These two products are already available in PyPI:
- iservices.rssdocument on PyPI
- iservices.rssdocument on Plone.org's index
- collective.collage.rssdocument on PyPI
They are also available on the collective:
Final note: it just works with latest versions of Plone 4.