The Feed Display module is used to display news feeds from other web sites. News feeds are generally used when you regularly want to access certain information from other web sites. So instead of visiting those web sites continually for the updated information, news feeds allow you to merge the updated content from the specific web sites into your pages. In other words, the Feed Display module is a facility that you can use to obtain new and updated content from the web site(s) that the feed is linked with.
The Feed Display module is of two types: the Site module type and the Administrator module type. If you want the module output on the front side, you can use the Site module type; choose the Administrator type if you want the output on the administrator interface. Choose the Administrator module type.
From the Module Manager page, click the Administrator link to display administrator type modules and click the New button to create a new module. You will be prompted to select the module type. From the list of displayed module types (refer to Figure 8-4), choose the Feed Display module type. Assign the title as News Feed Display to the new module (see Figure 8-13).
In the Feed URL field, you specify the URL of the RSS feed. Specify the URL http://rss.adobe.com/resources_flex.rss?locale=en_US in the Feed URL field. The RTL Feed option is used to specify whether the flow of information on your web site should go from right to left (RTL). You’ll usually set it to Yes for Arabic languages and the like, in which the flow of information is in the right-to-left direction. For this example, leave it at No.
Set Feed Title to Yes to display the feed title, set Feed Description to Yes to display the feed description, and set Feed Image to Yes to display the feed image.
The Items field is used to specify the number of news feed items to display. The default value for the Items field is 3.
Set Item Description to Yes to display the description of individual items. The Word Count field is used to specify the maximum number of words to display in the item description (a value of 0 means that the entire item description will be displayed.
From the Position combo box, choose the location in which you want to display the module. Select the title position to display the module at the top of the site.
When clicked, the Advanced section will display the fields as shown in Figure 8-14. As discussed earlier for other modules, in the Module Class Suffix field, you specify the suffix of the style class created in the template CSS file. This option is used for applying individual styles to the module.
After entering the information, click the Save & Close icon from the toolbar to save the module. Because this is the Administrator module, the impact of this module will appear at the back end (at the administrator interface). The moment you save the module, you’ll immediately see the impact of the module (the news feed from the supplied web site), as shown in Figure 8-15. Notice that the web site displays links to certain articles. Any changes made by the source web site in the feed contents will be reflected in your Feed Display module.
Note Because the news feed is regularly updated by the source web site, the list of items that you see may be entirely different from that shown in Figure 8-15.
Now let’s supply the URL of another RSS feed location in the Feed URL field: http://feeds.joomla.org/JoomlaMagazine. In your Joomla web site, the Feed Display module shows links to certain articles supplied by the new RSS feed URL entered, as shown in Figure 8-16.
You can select any link shown in the Feed Display module to see the corresponding information.
Source: Harwani B M (2015), Foundations of Joomla!, Apress; 2nd ed edition