Newsfeeds are used for receiving updates from certain web sites. If you regularly require access to information from certain web sites, it would be difficult to visit those web sites continually to look for updates. Newsfeeds help by merging the feeds from other pages into one page. This menu item type has three options in it, as shown in Figure 7-53:
- List All News Feed Categories
- List News Feeds in a Category
- Single News Feed
To understand these options, you need to create one more newsfeed inside the Cell Phones newsfeed category created in Chapter 6. Recall that in Chapter 6 you created a newsfeed category by the name of Cell Phones with one feed in it: “Cell Phones – fastest communication.” Let’s create a newsfeed with the name “Cell Phones – basic commodity” in the same Cell Phones newsfeed category. Select Components ➤ Newsfeeds ➤ Feeds; then click the New icon and enter the information shown in Figure 7-54 to create a newsfeed. In the Link field, enter the URL as http://www.computerweekly.com/rss/Mobile-technology.xml.
After entering the information as shown in Figure 7-54, click the Save & Close icon to save the newsfeed. There will now be two newsfeeds in the Cell Phones category, as shown in Figure 7-55.
Next, let’s look at the impact of each menu item type.
1. List All News Feed Categories
The menu item type List All News Feed Categories displays a list of all newsfeed categories. Open the New Electronics Among Cameras And Cell Phones menu item in edit mode. From the Menu Item Type combo box, select List All News Feed Categories option under the Newsfeed menu item type category. Leaving the values of other fields to their default (see Figure 7-56), click the Save & Close icon to save the changes.
If you open the browser window pointing to your Joomla web site, you’ll find that besides the default newsfeed categories provided by Joomla, there is a Cell Phones category, as shown in Figure 7-57. The number 2 in parentheses after Cell Phones indicates that it contains two newsfeeds.
If you select the Cell Phones newsfeed category, both the newsfeeds in that category are displayed, as shown in Figure 7-58.
You can select either of the links shown in Figure 7-58 to get updates from the specified web site (the web site to which these newsfeeds are linked).
Select the newsfeed “Cell Phones – fastest communication” from the Cell Phone category to see the information supplied by that newsfeed. You will see the list of five articles shown in Figure 7-59.
Similarly, the list of articles that will be displayed on selecting the “Cell Phones – basic commodity” newsfeed are as shown in Figure 7-60.
2. List News Feeds in a Category
This menu item type displays the list of all newsfeeds in the selected category. For this menu item type, you have to select only the newsfeed category whose newsfeeds you want to display. Let’s select the Cell Phones newsfeed category, as shown in Figure 7-61.
The Joomla web site will display the newsfeeds in the Cell Phone category, as shown previously in Figure 7-58.
3. Single Feed Layout
As the name suggests, this menu item type is used to show the articles from a single newsfeed. After selecting this menu item type, you need to select the newsfeed from which the updates have to be merged. You use the Feed drop-down list (see Figure 7-62) to specify the newsfeed from which you want to get updates upon selecting the menu item. Let’s select the newsfeed “Cell Phones-basic commodity” from the drop-down list.
Now this menu item will display the articles of the selected newsfeed, as shown previously in Figure 7-60.
4. Search
This menu item type has a search layout option, as shown in Figure 7-63.
The search layout option is used for displaying a search form in which users can enter a keyword to be searched for in articles, contacts, categories, and so on. (You learned how to use this menu item type in Chapter 6.)
Source: Harwani B M (2015), Foundations of Joomla!, Apress; 2nd ed edition