Hi guys, I am curious how certain kinds of ‘news’ sites work, the ones that seem to almost ‘auto’-update via feeds etc.
Say I wanted to make a site that was anti-water (for example) or something and I wanted the main page to show the most important and latest anti-water news from around the world.
Do I have to hunt for this news myself and add it manually or is there a secret (or a few secrets)?
Just a curiosity, and also, any tips are very welcome!
These days, some just pull from RSS feeds.
Absolutely right. In order to do so you need to have some knowledge about xml and http requests. I think you should Google for these subjects, along with, depending which server side programming you use (PHP, Coldfusion, etc), that program.
Thank you both, I appreciate the info.
I now have just a few further questions though…
To run such a site, the external site you are pulling news releases from must have its own rss feed, right?
Could this be done with a Wordpress based site, for easy adding of your own articles etc?
What if I wanted a forum on the site as well, would Wordpress then be a bad choice (not sure if you can use wordpress l/p for the forum)?
Your welcome
That’s right, otherwise there is nothing to pull
I never used oe of their templates myself, but I.M.H.O. Is that where Wordpress stands for, or at least that’s what they advocate. They have a wide range of plug-ins ranging from simple counter widgets to more complex ones where you can add pages dynamically.
Like I said I never used a Wordpress theme myself, but I know there are special Forum plugins. have a look here http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/forum-server/ .