R7.News

About R7.News

The goal of R7.News project is to provide a streamlined news subsystem for DNN Platform, which would take advantage from tight CMS integration and combinational approach to news article content authoring.

License

The R7.News is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

Main features outline:

• Mark news entry with tags and use them to provide granular thematic views.
• Cast any page into news article by placing R7.News.Agent module onto it.
• Streamline new articles creation by adding R7.News.Agent module into the page template.
• Allow users to discuss news on forum.
• DDRMenu integration (display news entries in the menu).
• Export news into Atom or RSS feeds.
• Keep news article page settings in sync with corresponding news entry properties.

Future releases may also include:

• News sharing between portals inside the portal group.
• Content workflow (at least Draft/Publish).

System requirements

• DNN Platform v8.0.4.

Install

1. Download and install dependencies first.
2. Download latest install package from releases.
3. Install it as usual from Host > Extensions.

Dependencies

• R7.DotNetNuke.Extensions (base library)

Setup discussion

In order to setup discussions for R7.News, you need do the following:

1. Install (or ensure you have installed) latest DNN Forum or ActiveForums extensions.

2. Open R7.News.yml config file in portal root directory in text editor.

3. Set proper values for params for required provider in discuss-provider section. E.g. if you have some DNN Forum module instance (moduleId=145) placed on page with tabId=40 and you want discussion posts to be created on specific forum (forumId=2), then your configuration should look like this:

   discuss-providers:
     - type: R7.News.Providers.DiscussProviders.DnnForumDiscussProvider
       provider-key: DnnForum
       params: ['40', '145', '2'] # tabId, moduleId, forumId

4. Comment unused providers using # sign.

5. Restart application to apply changes.

To disable discussions, your discuss-providers section in portal config file should look like this:

discuss-providers: []

Note that you could develop and register your own discuss providers by implementing IDiscussProvider public interface.

To allow R7.News to use custom discuss provider:

1. Place a DLL with custom discuss provider class into bin folder of DNN install.

2. Register custom discuss provider using portal config file by adding assembly name:

   discuss-providers:
     - type: YourCompany.DiscussProviders.YourCustomDiscussProvider, YourCompany.DiscussProviders
       provider-key: YourCustomProviderKey
       params: ['your', 'custom', 'provider', 'params', 'here']

3. Restart application to apply changes.

4. If all OK, you'll be able to create discussions for news entries using new provider. If not, see DNN event log for more info about what's wrong.

DDRMenu integration

R7.News provides public node manipulator class for DDRMenu. In order to use it, you should do the following:

1. Add Stream module instance to the page, configure it to display required news. Node manipulator will use this module instance settings to get required parameters (like taxonomy terms, "show all news" flag, etc.) The page size setting value will be used as max. number of menu entries for news to display.
2. Set node manipulator options in the R7.News.yml config file:

   node-manipulator:
     parent-node-tab-id: 77    # TabId of a parent menu node, to which news entries will be added as children
     stream-module-tab-id: 77  # TabId of a page with Stream module instance
     stream-module-id: 429     # ModuleId of Stream module instance

3. Specify R7.News.Stream.Integrations.DDRMenu.StreamNodeManipulator type name as NodeManipulator setting value in DDRMenu module settings or skinobject parameters.

Remember to check event log in case if something went wrong.

Uninstall

1. Uninstall R7.News library package first, this will remove all database objects and data.
2. Uninstall R7.News.Agent and R7.News.Stream module packages (in any order).