Home

New iNews website and newsfeeds

Publication Date: 
June 24, 2008
Expiration Date: 
June 24, 2011
Kalle Nemvalts, OCIO-Communications
Natalie Kato, OCIO-Communications
Weight: 
0
Body Text: 

On June 18, 2008, iNews was updated to a new, Drupal-based website running on CalWeb Pro, at the URL http://inews.berkeley.edu/.

Drupal, an open-source, web content-management system, allows us to manage the iNews workflow in one integrated environment, making the iNews process more efficient. The previous iNews application managed only the RSS feeds; the full-text articles were entered manually on a separate site. In addition, the previous iNews application was custom-built in Java, and was no longer cost-effective to support.

Overall, we feel that the new site is cleaner, easier to navigate, easier to read, and more accessible.

Newsfeeds

Drupal provides multiple RSS 2.0 newsfeeds, replacing the RSS 0.91 and RSS 1.0 newsfeeds in the old version of iNews. Newsfeed users, if they haven't already done so, will need to convert newsfeed URLs according to the following pattern:

That is, drop the port number :7077 from the base URL. Then replace rss091.xml or rss100.rdf at the end of the URL with feed. Unfortunately, because the new server environment does not allow us to use URLs with port numbers, we are unable to redirect old iNews URLs automatically.

In the new iNews, news pages and RSS newsfeeds are available for each of the topics listed in the left siderbar. You can access the newsfeeds by clicking on the orange newsfeed icon Syndicate content at the bottom of each topical news page. In addition, the iNews RSS Feeds page lists the available newsfeeds.

Drupal also allows us to aggregate newsfeeds from outside sources. For example, on the IT Security page, you can see links to several security-related newsfeeds that we believe are of interest to the campus IT community.

Related articles