Customizing the news feedsΒΆ

During the news step, all documents in a docrepo are published in one or more feeds. Each feed is made available in both Atom and HTML formats. You can control which feeds are created, and which documents are included in each feed, by overriding ferenda.DocumentRepository.news_criteria() to return a set of NewsCriteria objects, one for each feed. The process is similar to defining criteria for the TOC pages, but somewhat simpler and not directly connected to the data in the triple store.

Each NewsCriteria object should have a basefile, which is a slug-like short identifier for the feed. The default implementation creates a single feed named “main”. It should also have a feed title, which is used when presenting the feed. The default implementation uses the title “All documents”.

The interesting part of the NewsCriteria object is the selector parameter, which should be a function that gets called once for each document, with the corresponding DocumentEntry object. It should return either True or False, depending on whether this document should be included in this feed or not. The DocumentEntry object does not directly give access to the metadata for the document, but this information can be found by looking up the distilled RDF file that contains metadata about this document.

The entries in the feed are, by default, sorted descending on their updated property. If you need to override this, you can provide a key function which is called with a DocumentEntry object and returns a value that can be used for sorting.