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  • 10 Replies
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  • Posted26 days ago
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Create Posts that link to external posts in Post Title

This question is answered
Aaron Cope
Posted by
on Fri, Jan 27 2012 10:18 AM

We have a requirement where we need to manage our posts (publish on schedule and tag appropriately) in Telligent Community but link them out to external articles instead of the post detail page. While we can do this by removing the link to the post detail from the widget and then supplying the link in the post body around some nominal text (e.g. Read More), the requirement is to decorate the title itself with the external URL. I don't see a way to do this when creating a post in the admin. I also noticed that the cs_Posts table is constrained to an nvarchar(256), so we probably wouldn't be able to simply wrap the title with the anchor tag and href attribute while creating the post title and save to the db without column length violation exceptions being thrown.

Has anyone done this before? We considered using an RSS feed we would manage ourselves and publish through something like live writer, but we really want control over how these feeds would be categorized via tags and didn't know how to pull that off.

Any ideas on how to make this work?
Verified Answer
  • Michael Monteleone
    Posted by
    on Fri, Jan 27 2012 3:51 PM
    Verified Answer
    Verified by

    That's true.  It would require a customization of the widget not unlike the first workaround.  This is an alternative approach for getting that content into the community with tagging.  However, it does result in a locally-stored blog post, not simply an outbound link to the external post.

    Each of these approaches solves part of your challenge.  Editing the Blog Post List widget could allow you fully address it.
  • Michael Monteleone
    Posted by
    on Fri, Jan 27 2012 4:17 PM
    Verified Answer
    Verified by

    Excellent, let me know if you have any further questions.
All Replies
  • Michael Monteleone
    Posted by
    on Fri, Jan 27 2012 1:56 PM
    Suggested Answer

    So the requirement is to post timed, links?  

    If it was just to post links to externally hosted content, I would recommend you use the RSS Feed widget.   Its display is very similar to native blog posts.  Those posts will show up shortly after the RSS feed updates though, and not dependent on a tagged, scheduled, process.

    You could potentially create a new widget, based on the Blog Post List widget, which essentially takes the process you suggested (links in the blog post).  The rendering of the post's title in the widget could be adjusted to use the body of the post as the href target instead.  It would needed to be treated with care as it's somewhat of an unintended use of Blog Posts, but it could theoretically work.
  • Aaron Cope
    Posted by
    on Fri, Jan 27 2012 2:08 PM

    yeah i follow what you are saying here. so, we'd basically be treating the post body as a "dirty" field and injecting it's content (the hyperlink surrounding the post title, which would be replicated in the post body) and using it for the title instead of the actual post title, as intended?

    I like the RSS idea also, but I suppose you can't "tag" an RSS feed, right?
  • Michael Monteleone
    Posted by
    on Fri, Jan 27 2012 3:14 PM
    Suggested Answer

    Right, you can't tag an RSS feed.

    However, mirroring blog posts is also supported and is another definite option I forgot to mention in my first reply.  telligent.com/.../configure-mirrored-blog-feeds.aspx

    This captures the external content hosted in an rss feed and mirror it on a blog within a Community.  It should allow tagging as well, just as a native-written blog post.
  • Aaron Cope
    Posted by
    on Fri, Jan 27 2012 3:41 PM

    following that approach it appears that our feed brings over each feed item's url and embeds it in a "description" for "read more...", with the link out to the side of it. How do I reference the rss feed item's url as the title of the post instead of directing it over to the post detail?
  • Michael Monteleone
    Posted by
    on Fri, Jan 27 2012 3:51 PM
    Verified Answer
    Verified by

    That's true.  It would require a customization of the widget not unlike the first workaround.  This is an alternative approach for getting that content into the community with tagging.  However, it does result in a locally-stored blog post, not simply an outbound link to the external post.

    Each of these approaches solves part of your challenge.  Editing the Blog Post List widget could allow you fully address it.
  • Aaron Cope
    Posted by
    on Fri, Jan 27 2012 3:58 PM

    if i use the mirrored feed, what endpoint or in-process api property should i access to surface the external link?
  • Aaron Cope
    Posted by
    on Fri, Jan 27 2012 4:12 PM

    no worries. found it. $post.TitleUrl. this works perfect! thanks for the help!
  • Michael Monteleone
    Posted by
    on Fri, Jan 27 2012 4:17 PM
    Verified Answer
    Verified by

    Excellent, let me know if you have any further questions.
  • Aaron Cope
    Posted by
    on Mon, Jan 30 2012 3:43 PM

    any idea why the feed doesn't update automatically for us? we have the interval set to 1 minute. there's no errors in the log.txt for the job scheduler service. we don't use a proxy service either. and the box running the service can access the rss feed via the browser without any problems.
  • Aaron Cope
    Posted by
    on Mon, Jan 30 2012 3:46 PM

    also, what's weird is that whenever you delete a feed, it doesn't actually delete it from "cs_rollerblogfeeds". it just sets the "enabled" column value to 0. is this done so that old feeds can still surface through the site?