--- /dev/null
+{{*
+ * AUTOMATICALLY GENERATED TEMPLATE
+ * DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE, CHANGES WILL BE OVERWRITTEN
+ *
+ *}}
+<h2>Retriever Plugin Help</h2>
+<p>
+This plugin replaces the short excerpts you normally get in RSS feeds
+with the full content of the article from the source website. You
+specify which part of the page you're interested in with a set of
+rules. When each item arrives, the plugin downloads the full page
+from the website, extracts content using the rules, and replaces the
+original article.
+</p>
+<p>
+There's a few reasons you may want to do this. The source website
+might be slow or overloaded. The source website might be
+untrustworthy, in which case using Friendica to scrub the HTML is a
+good idea. You might be on a LAN that blacklists certain websites.
+It also works neatly with the mailstream plugin, allowing you to read
+a news stream comfortably without needing continuous Internet
+connectivity.
+</p>
+<p>
+However, setting up retriever can be quite tricky since it depends on
+the internal design of the website. This was designed to make life
+easy for the website's developers, not for you. You'll need to have
+some familiarity with HTML, and be willing to adapt when the website
+suddenly changes everything without notice.
+</p>
+<h3>Configuring Retriever for a feed</h3>
+<p>
+To set up retriever for an RSS feed, go to the "Contacts" page and
+find your feed. Then click on the drop-down menu on the contact.
+Select "Retriever" to get to the retriever configuration.
+</p>
+<p>
+The "Include" configuration section specifies parts of the page to
+include in the article. Each row has three components:
+</p>
+<ul>
+<li>An HTML tag (e.g. "div", "span", "p")</li>
+<li>An attribute (usually "class" or "id")</li>
+<li>A value for the attribute</li>
+</ul>
+<p>
+A simple case is when the article is wrapped in a "div" element:
+</p>
+<pre>
+ ...
+ <div class="main-content">
+ <h2>Man Bites Dog</h2>
+ <img src="mbd.jpg">
+ <p>
+ Residents of the sleepy community of Nowheresville were
+ shocked yesterday by the sight of creepy local weirdo Jim
+ McOddman assaulting innocent local dog Snufflekins with his
+ false teeth.
+ </p>
+ ...
+ </div>
+ ...
+</pre>
+<p>
+You then specify the tag "div", attribute "class", and value
+"main-content". Everything else in the page, such as navigation
+panels and menus and footers and so on, will be discarded. If there
+is more than one section of the page you want to include, specify each
+one on a separate row. If the matching section contains some sections
+you want to remove, specify those in the "Exclude" section in the same
+way.
+</p>
+<p>
+Once you've got a configuration that you think will work, you can try
+it out on some existing articles. Type a number into the
+"Retrospectively Apply" box and click "Submit". After a while
+(exactly how long depends on your system's cron configuration) the new
+articles should be available.
+</p>
+<h3>Techniques</h3>
+<p>
+You can leave the attribute and value blank to include all the
+corresponding elements with the specified tag name. You can also use
+a tag name of "*", which will match any element type with the
+specified attribute regardless of the tag.
+</p>
+<p>
+Note that the "class" attribute is a special case. Many web page
+templates will put multiple different classes in the same element,
+separated by spaces. If you specify an attribute of "class" it will
+match an element if any of its classes matches the specified value.
+For example:
+</p>
+<pre>
+ <div class="article breaking-news">
+</pre>
+<p>
+In this case you can specify a value of "article", or "breaking-news".
+You can also specify "article breaking-news", but that won't match if
+the website suddenly changes to "breaking-news article", so that's not
+recommended.
+</p>
+<p>
+One useful trick you can try is using the website's "print" pages.
+Many news sites have print versions of all their articles. These are
+usually drastically simplified compared to the live website page.
+Sometimes this is a good way to get the whole article when it's
+normally split across multiple pages.
+</p>
+<p>
+Hopefully the URL for the print page is a predictable variant of the
+normal article URL. For example, an article URL like:
+</p>
+<pre>
+ http://www.newssite.com/article-8636.html
+</pre>
+<p>
+...might have a print version at:
+</p>
+<pre>
+ http://www.newssite.com/print/article-8636.html
+</pre>
+<p>
+To change the URL used to retrieve the page, use the "URL Pattern" and
+"URL Replace" fields. The pattern is a regular expression matching
+part of the URL to replace. In this case, you might use a pattern of
+"/article" and a replace string of "/print/article". A common pattern
+is simply "$", used to add the replace string to the end of the URL.
+</p>
+<h3>Background Processing</h3>
+<p>
+Note that retrieving and processing the articles can take some time,
+so it's done in the background. Incoming articles will be marked as
+invisible while they're in the process of being downloaded. If a URL
+fails, the plugin will keep trying at progressively longer intervals
+for up to a month, in case the website is temporarily overloaded or
+the network is down.
+</p>
+<h3>Retrieving Images</h3>
+<p>
+Retriever can also optionally download images and store them in the
+local Friendica instance. Just check the "Download Images" box. You
+can also download images in every item from your network, whether it's
+an RSS feed or not. Go to the "Settings" page and
+click <a href="{{$config}}">"Plugin settings"</a>. Then check the "All
+Photos" box in the "Retriever Settings" section and click "Submit".
+</p>
+<h2>Configure Feeds:</h2>
+<div>
+{{foreach $feeds as $feed}}
+{{include file="contact_template.tpl" contact=$feed}}
+{{/foreach}}
+</div>
projects / friendica-addons.git / blobdiff