It would be very useful to be able to render RSS feeds into HTML on a TWiki page - this would let TWiki act as a simple portal, pulling in news feeds from weblogs such as SlashDot, news sites such as CNN and Moreover, intranet sites/apps (e.g. new bugs from a bug tracking tool), Wiki sites (including other TWiki webs or sites on the intranet), and even NewsGroups. This is the opposite of the useful TWikiSyndication feature, with TWiki consuming RSS feeds rather than producing them.

My most immediate goal is to be able to pull in the last few messages from selected NewsGroups on a page - I now have the newsgroups generating RSS feeds, but parsing and rendering RSS is not quite so easy.

Some work may have been done on this (see SlashdotPlugin by JustinHickman) but the code for this seems to have got lost somewhere.

Is this useful for anyone else?

-- RichardDonkin - 18 Feb 2002

TWiki has now a RSS reader that can be used to build portals, see Plugins.HeadlinesPlugin

-- PeterThoeny - 12 Jun 2002

There are now some serious efforts to address the "Portal" requirements for an organization. For example:

• Apache's JetSpeed, with Sample site
• eZpublish - though it is more of content management software (but can be used for portals):
• MetaDot Portal Server

These applications allow a lot of control over the "Home page" of the intranet server. One can have multiple boxes that pull in different information such as slashdot news, my set of tasks for today (from calendar service), today's weather etc. One can select the set of boxes that should appear in the main page, and also, choose their placements (like "my.yahoo.com").

TWiki will require similar capabilities. (I find it very difficult to attract visitors to the corporate site that I host on my machine. And this is due to lack of the Portal look.) Should these capabilities be built into TWiki? Or should we "glue" one of the above packages with TWiki? Glue would mean that the look and feel of portal server remains (i.e. the skin is controlled by Portal), and content management becomes seamless part of the portal system.

We are already seeing such glue happen in case of Slash and Scoop. These are weblogs, and not portals (though the distinction is less and less clear of late.) Even though they are integrating Wiki concept, I would like to see TWiki to be integrated - because TWiki is already feature rich, and there is focus on good scriptability (WikiControlLanguage) and more important, RSS.

-- VinodKulkarni - 14 Jun 2002

At my daytime job we are currently rolling out a TWiki-based TWikiNewsPortal which replaces the static internal home page.

-- PeterThoeny - 21 Sep 2003