Filter External News Feeds

New options are available for the News data file to provide better control when importing articles from external data sources (e.g. news feeds imported from other sites).

Some users may be aware that NewsCenter uses 2 data feeds to improve performance of their homepage and other news feeds on the site. Their main data feed is limited to the latest 200 articles, while an archive feed provides the full list. Since NewsCenter has published more than 200 articles per year since at least 2011, that archive feed is probably the more attractive option for other sites to import, except that it is an ever-growing file that currently weighs in at more than 6 MB, and adding that to your own site's news feed can really impact the performance of your site's news.

While an archive feed and limit on the number of articles in the main feed can help if you have a lot of relevant articles on your site, the manner in which this functionality works made it less helpful for other sites. New options allow tag filters so you can configure your data feed to only pull articles from an external feed which include certain tags, or exclude articles which include other tags.

Action Required

While these new fields will be available in new sites, they will have to be added to the news data PCF in existing sites before you will be able to use them.

If you want these fields added to an existing site, please open a ticket in ServiceNow by navigating to Request a Service > Web Services > Modern Campus CMS > General Site/Page Update Request - Modern Campus CMS.