CUNY Academic Commons

Just FYI, I've made Chris a watcher on this ticket.

Check out our sandbox site here: http://www.humanrightstech.org/sandbox/ This is the test site for http://research.commons.gc.cuny.edu/. I'm pulling in headlines from the various ARC project feeds with WP-RSSImport.

The http://gcdi.commons.gc.cuny.edu/feed/ feed is working better now than when I first reported the problem. It still does occasionally return a "No items, feed is empty." message, but is mostly working now.

Thanks for the additional details, Chris.

Given what you've described, one of two things are happening. (1) The plugin is unable to access the feed at all, either because of network issues (like maybe your sandbox is behind a particular kind of firewall) or because of hiccups on the Commons end. (2) Occasionally, an item moves through the GCDI feed with something like an

<iframe>

I'm testing out the WP-RSSImport widget on a Commons sandbox, and it seems to be parsing the feed items correctly from http://gcdi.commons.gc.cuny.edu/feed/. So it's possible that you're using a particular configuration of the RSSImport widget that is surfacing the issue. But there are so many options on the widget that I don't want to try to guess which could be the culprit :)

Since your sandbox is not on the Commons, it's hard for me to do any live debugging in an environment that's demonstrating the problem. Can I ask you to create a new private site on the Commons, activate WP-RSSImport, and set up the GCDI feed widget in the same way you have it set up in the sandbox? (No need to worry about the theme or the rest of the configuration - I'm pretty certain that those things are not relevant.) Then, let me know whether your new sandbox is demonstrating the problem. If it is, then I can debug more effectively. And if not, we can check periodically to see if it does fail in the future, at which point I can dig in.

Thanks in advance for your help.

I agree that it would be best to have the sandbox install in the same environment as the production site. Thanks, Chris and Boone.

I agree that it would be best to have the sandbox install in the same environment as the production site.

I'm not really suggesting this - if Chris needs to be editing the theme and otherwise accessing the codebase, then it won't work to have the sole sandbox on the Commons. But for reasons such as the problem reported in this ticket, it's important to test in the production environment at at least some point in the process.

Good point.

Thanks, Boone. Makes sense. I set up a test page on the Commons here:

http://chriscaruso.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2012/06/25/rss-test/

And everything seems to work fine.

I wasn't able to do an ARC sandbox on the Commons because I needed the Advanced Excerpt plugin to be able to display RSS titles properly in the particular theme we are using for ARC. But you are right that the proper way to test the RSS feeds is on the Commons. So since this seems to work fine, I think we are all set to update to the new RSS features for the ARC page with the next Commons release.

Thanks again for your help.

Hi Chris,

Just FYI, the privacy setting on your Commons dev environment looks like it is set to fully public, so your blog feed is showing up on the home page of the Commons. If you choose any other privacy setting, it won't show up in the sitewide feed. Not a big deal, but just wanted to give you a heads-up.

Best,

Matt

Okay, thanks. I changed the privacy setting to 'admins only'.

Chris

I've incorporated the RSS feeds into the front page of the live ARC site here:

http://research.commons.gc.cuny.edu/

And the GCDI RSS feed still has intermittent problems. It sometimes (but not always) produces the error "No items, feed is empty.…" instead of displaying the feeds. Usually a simple browser refresh solves the problem, but I have some concerns about first impressions. None of the other feeds I am pulling seem to be having problems. Thanks for any help.

Nice detective work, Boone -- many thanks.

Genius! Thanks so much. I've updated the other feeds as well.