tt_news is the standard extension in TYPO3 to display news lists and items. It's easily extendable and has a ton of features, including feed generation.
When creating neatful.de, the requirement was to supply a feed with links to the latest projects on the site, together with some project images. The news feed is updated manually - automatically was an option first, but using the latest change date on a page would also mean that an old page would get listed on the feed if you just fixed a typo on it.
I came across several problems when creating the feed:
- The chosen format of the feed is Atom, but tt_news did not send out the correct Content-Type headers automatically.
- tt_news' atom feed template does not have a self link.
-
tt_news news items have a tab "media" that is used to attach
images to the item, independent of the
RTE.
When adding the
###NEWS_IMAGE###marker to the feed template, the image URLs are relative - since tt_news expects a base URL to be set.
The content header problem was fixed easily with
xmlnews.config.additionalHeaders = Content-Type: application/atom+xml
Generating absolute image links
The problem in my case was that the feed is available under
http://www.neatful.de/feed/
and image links are generated relative and with the expectation that the page URL is a file in the root directory, i.e. index.php?id=23:
typo3temp/pics/152f637f34.jpg
This is a well known issue that is easily fixed in HTML by adding a
base URL to the
<head>. This is unfortunately not possible in a feed.
A solution?
I found a dozen pages that recommended the following:
That TypoScript code makes image src attributes absolute - when the images are inserted in the text of the RTE. Since the "normal" media file integration is used in my case, this did not help.
A patch for tt_news
The correct way to solve the relative image problem is to set
config.absRefPrefix to the domain name,
http://www.neatful.de/ in my case.
I did that and got correct image URLs! Unfortunately, tt_news did now break the detail links by double-prefixing them with the domain again, leading to links like http://www.neatful.de/http://www.neatful.de/sticking/.
At first I thought I did something wrong, but then found out that tt_news version 3.0.1 simply contains a to that date unknown bug. A fix was easily implemented, and so I opened bug #17458 in the TYPO3 bug tracker and attached my patch.
Example
In case someone is interested in the News feed configuration, here it is:
news.ts
tt_news-atom-1.0.tmpl
###XML_DECLARATION###]]> ###SITE_TITLE### neatful hello@neatful.de ###SITE_LINK### ###NEWS_LASTBUILD### TYPO3 - get.content.right ###SITE_DESCRIPTION### ###NEWS_COPYRIGHT######NEWS_TITLE### ###NEWS_MODIFIED### ###NEWS_CREATED### ###NEWS_ATOM_ENTRY_ID###