Syndication - RSS and Atom Feeds
http://www.thestoresuiteblog.com/articles/46/1/Syndication---RSS-and-Atom-Feeds/Page1.html
By Chris Boulton
Published on 11/5/2007
Hi, I'm Chris B. and as Mitch has previously mentioned, I'm one of Interspire's new recruits and will be working on StoreSuite along side Mitch. I spent the better half of Friday afternoon and a few hours this morning working on implementing RSS and Atom feed support in to StoreSuite...
Hi,
I'm Chris B. and as Mitch has previously mentioned, I'm one of
Interspire's new recruits and will be working on StoreSuite along side
Mitch.
I spent the better half of Friday afternoon and a few hours this morning working on implementing RSS and Atom feed support in to StoreSuite - two features that whilst they may seem fairly simple, we've made quite powerful.
For
those that don't know, RSS (and Atom) feeds are a method of publishing
content in another format that users can subscribe to. Users subscribe
to the feeds in an RSS reader and can receive almost real-time updates when content changes. Atom feeds are similar to RSS, just a slightly different format.
StoreSuite has built in support for 5 different kinds of syndication feeds:
To increase awareness of the RSS feeds, we've added the small feed icon (
)
that is becoming the standard for notifying users that a syndicated
version selected page is also available. StoreSuite will also notify
supported web browsers (Firefox, Internet Explorer 7 and Safari) that
these feeds are available on the store.
Each of these different feed types can easily be enabled or disabled via the Administration Panel for those that don't need such features in their store.
RSS Readers generally fetch the most recent content for each feed within a 15 to 60 minute interval - some even more often than that which can be a bad thing. StoreSuite has built in RSS caching support so that an RSS feed is cached (saved) for a predefined interval to help combat a large amount of feed requests within a short time period.
The most powerful feature, however, with the RSS support is that when users perform a custom search on a copy of StoreSuite they can also save their custom search as an RSS feed. This means that once they're subscribed to the feed and new products are added to the store that match their search criteria, they're notified directly in their RSS reader.
To subscribe to an advanced search using an RSS reader, users can quite simply click on the "View Results as RSS Feed" link at the bottom of a search results page.
A built in StoreSuite page also has an overview of the feeds that are available and explains what an RSS/syndication feed is for your visitors:
So there you have it - an overview of the very powerful and built in content syndication features within StoreSuite.
Hi, I'm Chris B. and as Mitch has previously mentioned, I'm one of Interspire's new recruits and will be working on StoreSuite along side Mitch. I spent the better half of Friday afternoon and a few hours this morning working on implementing RSS and Atom feed support in to StoreSuite...
Syndication - RSS and Atom Feeds
Hi,
I'm Chris B. and as Mitch has previously mentioned, I'm one of
Interspire's new recruits and will be working on StoreSuite along side
Mitch.I spent the better half of Friday afternoon and a few hours this morning working on implementing RSS and Atom feed support in to StoreSuite - two features that whilst they may seem fairly simple, we've made quite powerful.
For
those that don't know, RSS (and Atom) feeds are a method of publishing
content in another format that users can subscribe to. Users subscribe
to the feeds in an RSS reader and can receive almost real-time updates when content changes. Atom feeds are similar to RSS, just a slightly different format.StoreSuite has built in support for 5 different kinds of syndication feeds:
- Latest products added to the store
- Most popular products as rated by store visitors
- Per-category latest & most popular products
- Advanced product searches (a little more on this one later)
- Recent news items
To increase awareness of the RSS feeds, we've added the small feed icon (
)
that is becoming the standard for notifying users that a syndicated
version selected page is also available. StoreSuite will also notify
supported web browsers (Firefox, Internet Explorer 7 and Safari) that
these feeds are available on the store.Each of these different feed types can easily be enabled or disabled via the Administration Panel for those that don't need such features in their store.
RSS Readers generally fetch the most recent content for each feed within a 15 to 60 minute interval - some even more often than that which can be a bad thing. StoreSuite has built in RSS caching support so that an RSS feed is cached (saved) for a predefined interval to help combat a large amount of feed requests within a short time period.
The most powerful feature, however, with the RSS support is that when users perform a custom search on a copy of StoreSuite they can also save their custom search as an RSS feed. This means that once they're subscribed to the feed and new products are added to the store that match their search criteria, they're notified directly in their RSS reader.
To subscribe to an advanced search using an RSS reader, users can quite simply click on the "View Results as RSS Feed" link at the bottom of a search results page.
A built in StoreSuite page also has an overview of the feeds that are available and explains what an RSS/syndication feed is for your visitors:
So there you have it - an overview of the very powerful and built in content syndication features within StoreSuite.