News aggregation on lilypond.org?

[Valentin Villenave]

Greetings John,

correct me if I'm wrong: currently the news.ihtml on the web branch
only contains the three last "news" items, does it? And every time one
wants to add some piece of news, one has to delete the last item?

My question is the following:
Could we (namely you) tweak the format-page.py Python script to create
the news from an XML file instead of an ihtml ?

There are three ways of doing so:
- either you write some python magic code to just automatically take
the last three items, and replace <title> with <h1>, <description>
with <class="description"> etc.
- either you use some PyXML library,
- either you use one line of JavaScript that will automatically
display the last three items from the XML file.
- either you use two lines of PHP that will do exactly the same thing.

This way,
- we wouldn't loose the past piece of news (they'd be archived instead)
- we'd be able to have a decent RSS feed on the website.

For instance, our news.xml file could look like:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<rss version="2.0">
  <channel>
    <title>Version 2.11.55 released</title>
    <link>http://ww.lilypond.org/web/install</link>
    <description>This version brings new bugfixes, etc.</description>
    <language>en-us</language>
    <item>
      <title>Another piece of news</title>
      <link>http://www.whatever.com/whatever</link>
      <description>Blah blah blah.</description>
      <dc:creator>Han-Wen</dc:creator>
      <dc:date>2008-04-26</dc:date>
    </item>
  </channel>
</rss>

We could even keep the current tags, as RSS 2.0 accepts HTML tags: see
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/rss/encodingDescriptions.html

    <title><b>LilyPond 2.11.45 available</b> -</title>
  <description><dd>Release 2.11.45 fixes a couple of bugs in the formatting<
    engine.</dd></description>

I'm not offering to do this myself, as Python is still totally unfamiliar to me.
I can, however, handle the XML/HTML/JS/PHP part.

Comments?

Cheers,
Valentin