RSS Feed

RSS feeds are normally hosted on your server and polled (and read) by any RSS Readers that have a link to your feeds.

Output Filename

Type in the name of the file hold the RSS feed information. You can put it in a specific directory on the PC. When it is transferred to the remote server on the name of the file is used. In the example above this woul dbe Products.xml.

You can use the following html on your website to allow your customers to subscribe to your feed:

<table width="100%" border="0">
<tr>
<td valign="middle" align="center"><a href="RSSFEEDLINK" target="_blank"><img src="RSSFeed.jpg" border="0"></a></td>
<td valign="middle" align="left"><a href="RSSFEEDLINK" target="_blank">Site RSS Feed</a></td>
</tr>
</table>

Where:

RSSFEELINK is the link where the RSS feed is on your website (e.g. http://www.mole-end.biz/RSSMoleEnd.xml)
The imagefile for the feed is readily available on the internet and should be hosted on your site. In this case it is called RSSFeed.jpg.

Server to upload Feed to

Click on the Get Actinic Settings to use the same settings as your Actinic website.

The Username and Password are the name and password that you use within Actinic to upload your site (if you are hosting the file on your own server).

Information to include in the feed

You can include various areas of your website. This depends on the audience for your RSS feed. The areas that can be included are:

Products
This will create a feed detailing links to all of your products on your website. You can decide to only include the first n product pages and order the information by Reference, Description, Update Date or Creation.

Sections
If you want to include your main sections, that include multiple products, tick this option.

Brochure Pages
If you are using the RSS feed as a sitemap you should tick this option to include any additional web pages found.

Properties

You can Add, Edit or Amend your properties. When you Add or Edit a property the following dialog is displayed :

Variable

The property type can either be a standard RSS type or you can specify your own. In the example, each product has a comment of 'Contact us if you require any products that you don't see on our website'.

NOTE : If you want to override the default values generated from your Actinic product details you can do this by supplying your own values (fixed or from a CustomVar). You can override the following values by selecting the relevant Standard Variable (in the Variable section).

title
Name of product. This defaults to the product name provided in Actinic.

description

Description of product. This defaults to the main product description defined in Actinic.

guid

Unique id of the image. This is normally the html page for the feed.

link

HTML page to display when the product is clicked on. This defaults to the product page within your Actinic shop.

Value

To have the same value for all of your products select the Use Text option. To have a different value for a shop section select Section under Type. To have a different value for each product select Product as Type. If Use CustomVar has been selected you should select a CustomVar (defined within Actinic and values assigned for each product) to retrieve the information from.

If you are using Actinic V8 you would create CustomVars by creating Variables in the Design Library. You would normally create these in the General Group. Also add in a Default value to use for the product. This will be used if a Custom Var hasn’t been used for a product.

Products to Include
You can choose which products to include based upon a custom variable. This is very similar to the Exclude from Froogle Feed/Google Product Search Data Feed setting within Actinic.If you tick Check value before including you can choose a custom variable (clicking on the Set button) you are shown the following dialog:



You can then select the custom variable to use to determine if you want to include this product in the feed. You can set the default value to True (include in feed) or False (don't include in feed). This value will be used if a custom variable value has not been assigned to a product.

Note: When you create a custom value you should set its type to True/False.

Advanced features

If you want to use the values created by the Product Mash in different fields than the default ones you can use the following macros to substitute these values. For example, if you want the Actinic description to appear as the item’s name you should define a fixed value for the title as !!Description!!.

There are more advanced ways to include information from Actinic (or from different fields). See the Advanced Features section for more details