When it comes to developing your own web
content application, website or professional web application, there are
many CMS platforms (both licensed and Open Source) that you can choose
from. However, I think that Jahia xCM is a great tool for this type of
project.
What makes Jahia xCM a good choice? The awesome Java
Technology Platform it uses as base technology and the list of features
available for administrators, developers and editors are just some of
the reasons. Comparing Jahia to other CMS platforms can get cumbersom,
but I think one powerful feature in particular makes it stand out: its
modular architecture.
On the Jahia website, there is documentation about what modules are and how to build and work with them:
"Each module is equivalent to a “plug-in” which extends the
functionality of Jahia and manages one or several specific business
case."
It's that simple. A module is a piece of
software you can build and deploy to accomplish with a specific
requirement on your website or web application. This is really
interesting, specially for architects and developers, because it
represents the solution for most of the complex requirements on a
project.
Jahia
xCM comes with a great list of modules that are comparable to other CMS
platforms on the market. Those modules are classified under several
categories (this is really well documented on provided link). Here I'll
go through the features of a specific module found into the "Social
Components" category: "Display external RSS feed".
As the name
implies, this module is an RSS feed client that displays content from
any public access source. As we can expect, there are some basic
attributes to configure the behavior of this module:
- RSS feed URL: the URL of the RSS feed source.
- Number of entries per pages: This attribute controls how many feed items you want to display. This is not related to pagination.
Let's go with a sample to see the module working using the integration environment described here [link to previous post]):
- First
let's create a new project on Jahia xCM 6.6 using the system templates
(I called it test-project). This will let us start from scratch without
any template or CSS issue.
- Add a page under the Home using the "simple" template (I called it rss_client).
The project should look like this on edit mode:
All
the modules deployed into the Jahia xCM host (deployed [link to a post
about deploying modules]) can be used on all the projects hosted there,
but since version 6.6 of Jahia xCM modules are not "available" by
default for all projects. This means if you need a specific module
(provided by Jahia xCM or deployed by you), you need to make it
available for the project.
This can be done two ways:
- On
the project creation process, there is a new step where you can select
the module or modules that you want to activate for the new project.
- In
case of existent projects you can make a module available using the
Studio UI just deploying the specific module. This works the same as
when you need to deploy a template set to a specific project after doing
modifications.
In our case, we need to deploy the module Jahia RSS Feeds (1.2) on the test_project:
Once
the module is available for the test_project, we can add it into the
specific area we want. For this sample we're going to use the "listA"
content area (see nextimage) to add the module:
We need to define the values for the module:
As the result of this process, we should see the two first items of the RSS feed displayed into the page area: