📰News

Allows users to add news or view an RSS feed in your app.

Users of your app will be presented with a list of articles from the chosen RSS feed or from a list of articles that have been manually added. Clicking on an article opens a new screen that shows the content of the article. The "More" button takes the user to the article itself via a mobile browser.

Adding the RSS building block

1. Click on + Block.

2. Select the News block and click Add this block.

3. Select the Manual option if you'd like to add the articles directly to the app or select RSS option if you'd like to load an article feed into your app.

   
4. Click Continue.

5. Fill in the name of the block.

   
6. Click on the icon if you want to change the image used in the menu.

7. When you’re done, click Finish.

How to add content to the Manual News block

1. Under the Data tab on the right side of the screen, click on Create New.

2. Enter the Date, Time, Title, Image, Description, and Website to the wizard.

   
3. Click Save

How to add an RSS feed to your News block

1. Once you've added your block, go to the Settings tab.

2. Enter the URL of your RSS feed in the URL field.

   
3. Select the desired Order from the dropdown menu

4. Select or deselect the desired settings for the way RSS articles are presented in the app.

How to configure your News block

After you've added your News block you need to configure it. The News block editor is composed of two or three editing screens; Data, Settings, and Design.

The Data tab allows you to edit articles (if you've chosen the Manual News block option), the settings in the Settings editing screen determines how your block will function while those in the Design screen determine the aesthetics of the News block.

Data

The Data tab allows you to add new articles to the Manual News block. It also allows you to edit, delete, or reorder the articles in the block.

Settings

There are several aspects of your News block that can be changed in this screen; the name of the feed, the icon (or image) that will be used in the app menu, the top image for the RSS screen and the RSS source URL. You can choose which aspects of the chosen RSS feed you would like to display by means of the sliding YES-NO selectors. You can also choose the order in which the feed is displayed (Ascending or Descending by date) and under View you can choose the layout in which your feed is presented.

Should the need arise to keep the users of your published app from using this portion of the app, then you can always make use of the ON/OFF selector.

Slide the selector to OFF to keep users from using the RSS feed. Now you can continue developing your app without worrying about users coming upon areas that you haven't finished developing as of yet. Once you are satisfied with your progress, slide the selector back to ON to publish this portion of your app.

Design

The "Design" screen allows your to make highly detailed changes to your building block. "Design" gives the developer a remarkable amount of freedom to adjust everything exactly as he or she would like it. If you'd like to know more about how "Design" works, click here.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is RSS?

RSS is a simple mechanism that allows people to be kept up to date as to what changes are being made to a website. Users of an RSS feed need to be subscribed to that webpage to receive these updates. RSS is used primarily to track pages that are updated frequently, like news websites, though RSS can be adapted to any website. RSS organises a page in a standardised format which includes a title, an image, an introduction and a date, so that it can be read by an RSS-Reader. By subscribing to RSS feeds, a user can follow changes made to a large number of websites within a single RSS-Reader.

How does RSS work?

The website needs to publish an RSS-feed for a specific page. Not every webpage on the internet automatically has an RSS feed linked to it. You can usually tell if a page does have an RSS feed linked to it by looking for the square, orange RSS logo with the stripes in it:

An RSS-feed is always composed of an XML webpage. Clicking on the orange RSS logo will bring you to this page. These usually look like this:

As you can tell, the XML output is not very user friendly. This is where the RSS-Reader comes in handy. One of the most popular RSS-Readers is Google Reader. With an RSS-Reader a user can track the changes made to a webpage simply by submitting the RSS page's URL to the reader. That's called subscribing to a RSS Feed. The RSS building block in AppMachine functions as an RSS-Reader.

Does my website/web page have an RSS feed?

This depends on the website. Many websites and content management systems do offer the option of making an RSS feed available for certain pages. Most WordPress based website have an RSS feed at /?feed=rss, /?feed=rss2, /?feed=rdf or /?feed=atom. • http://www.mywebsite.com/?feed=rss • http://www.mywebsite.com/?feed=rss2 • http://www.mywebsite.com/?feed=rdf • http://www.mywebsite.com/?feed=atom The RSS feed within a WordPress website can be managed in Settings-> Reading once you've logged in to your admin page (wp-admin). This allows you to designate which posts to include in your RSS Feed as well as the format of the descriptions and full text.

Is there a way to remove the 'Share' or 'More' button at the bottom of an RSS article?

Under the Settings tab you can deselect Enable sharing and/or the Hide 'Read more' button.

If I share an article from a RSS feed in my app it does only contain a title. Where is the url?

If your feed does not contain a URL to share, we are unable to add this to the sharing data.