Managing Site Feeds

Feeds are used to automate content from small parts of a page to generating entire sections of your site.

Blux feeds enable you to integrate external content such as:

• Social data like tweets, facebook posts, and instagram pictures
• RSS feeds for data like blogs and news
• API's for events, 3rd party tools, or custom solutions
• Manually create and edit content with the feed editor

Feeds allow you to separate content management from design so you can enable others to easily manage content on the site while also being able to continuously refresh or tweak your site's design and display of that content.

Feeds can be used to populate blocks as sub-blocks. You can even mix manually created blocks (created and managed in the Blux page editor) with sub-blocks from feeds for unlimited customization and automation. Feed data can also be used to populate page templates and be published with your site.

To create a feed go into the Content section of the Blux app and then go into the "Feeds" area. All of the feeds that you have for the site will be listed in the main feeds area as well as in the left panel.

To create a new feed press the "Add Feed" button in the left panel. Once the feed is created it will be listed in the main feeds area as well as in the left panel. Press on the feed to edit the feed settings. The right panel will show the options for the feed. Using the right panel you can configure your feed to pull data from different sources. If you want to manage the data yourself simply set the feed type to be "Manually Managed".

Manually Managed Feeds
If the feed is "Manually Managed" the main section of the app will have a button to add a feed item. Once an item is added you can press on the title to edit the individual feed item. The right panel will open with all options for editing or deleting the feed item. The main content area will allow you to edit the title and body of the feed item using the rich editor.

Manually managed feeds also allow you to add additional fields for each feed item. Additional fields are used when using our Custom Elements feature to extend the basic functionality with completely custom functionality.

External Data Feeds
If the feed is not "Manually Managed" it will display each post found from the feed source as a preview of the feed content.

When editing any block on any page the right panel will have a "Feeds" tab. All of your feeds will be listed with the options of which feeds to include and how to display that data in your block. The "Sub Blocks" tab will also have important options for displaying your feed content as sub-blocks.

To use feeds to generate pages on your site you will need to first create a page template using mustache style tokens as placeholders for feed content. For example if you make the title of a block {{title}} that token will be replaced with the title from the feed.

When your template is created, edit the settings for the feed that you want to publish as pages on your site. In the right panel of the feed editor (for the feed itself, not an individual feed item) you can enable the checkbox to publish with site content and select which section of your site and which template to publish into. The URL of the page will be determined by the URL set on each individual feed item. If no URL is set the URL will be generated as a URL friendly (and unique) reformatting of the feed item title. When editing an individual feed item that is part of a feed to be published with the site there will be an option to preview the feed item in the template for your review.

Here are the basic elements of a feed item to populate a template with:

• {{title}}
• {{body}}
• {{date}}
• {{url}}
• {{media}}

Any custom fields added to the feed will also have their tokens replace with the matching field. For example if you add a custom field to the feed with the field "author" you will be able to use it in your page template with the token {{author}}

Here is an example screenshot of a template that will be populated by a feed and published.