What is RSS

RSS feeds are an established standard of feeding content from a website or service for others to draw in on demand, they are most famous for feeding news & blogs from sites into external readers. More recently ecommerce platforms supply them.

The data format is called XML and RSS delivers XML data with a consistent set of attributes, allowing universal access without any need for extra customisation in order read their data.

RSS itself has a fairly limited set of item attributes it will supply. More recently sites have added more attributes and even made feeds customisable but still called them RSS, when in fact they are XML feeds. For instance, strict RSS does not include images.

In PureCampaign you have the opportunity to add an RSS feed and all of the strict RSS attributes can be dynamically pulled into your message for a campaign.

This is very handy when your CMS is frequently updated by your content staff and you are saved from having to copy and paste into messages at the last minute.

In PureCampaign, RSS feeds are added to emails in two parts: An RSS feed and an RSS region
The RSS Feed is the link to the RSS feed itself and how much to pull in.
An RSS region is per message and allows you to control how the RSS feed content is rendered in each message.

Add an RSS Feed

You get to the RSS feeds page from the Messages page sub-nav menu.
Go to Messages > RSS Feeds.

 

You will be taken to the RSS Feeds page.

If you do not have any feeds set-up you will need to make one, otherwise you will get a list of your feeds, their url and the chance to edit or delete them.

 

New RSS Feed

To add a new feed click the “New RSS Feed” button to enter the editor

The least you need to do is enter a name and a valid RSS url

All of the other settings have defaults, so once these two are complete you could hit save or finish.

You may wish to further customise certain aspects of the feed…

 

• Maximum number of RSS items to display
  • You may want to bring in more or less items to any message using this feed
• Maximum number of characters to display before appending “read more” link
  • If you intend to include the ‘description’ RSS attribute, which is the long content section, you can decide how many characters to pull in.
  • Sometime you might only bring in titles so you can ignore this.
  • If you want to pull in the whole page: push this as high as it will go.
  • If you just want a small teaser beneath the title, use a low number.
• Link text to display for the “read more” link when max character count is exceeded
  • If the description content is used in a region, when or if the description content is longer than the character limit, something will be added to the end and linked to that RSS item’s page. You can choose the characters added for that link or leave the default in place.
• Date format
  • If you intend to show the published date attribute of each feed item, you can choose the date format.
• Cut text at the nearest space when max character count is exceeded
  • If the description content is used in a region, when or if the description content is longer than the character limit, it will be cut;.
  • With this enabled it won’t chop through a word but instead cut at the nearest space character before or after.
• Strip XML/HTML code from the content
  • Many RSS feeds’ description attribute will contain HTML in order to help its look and feel when it is rendered at the other end.
  • Not every feed will supply email friendly HTML
  • Toggle this on to force the content from the RSS description into plain text, then apply any styles in the region and or message html.
  • RSS users whose RSS description is a full page, often leave this off, so that most of the email content is populated by the RSS, as long as the HTML from the feed item is inbox friendly.

Once you are happy with your settings, hit finish.

 

RSS Regions

In the HTML editor (and legacy visual editor) there will be an option in the sidebar for RSS regions.

 

Clicking this will open your RSS regions window.
If you do this in a new message, that has never been saved, you will be asked to save it, in order to access the regions window.

 

 

The regions window will show you this message’s current regions for you to see and manage, if you have any.
You can only create new RSS regions, if your profile has any RSS feeds.

If you have at least one RSS feed, the first time you open the RSS regions window, your message will obviously not have any regions, so you will be asked to make one.

 

Clicking “New RSS Region” opens the RSS region editor window.

The least you need to do, in order to save/finish is to name the region and choose a feed to pull from.
The name will be added to your message like a personalisation tag, so it cannot have spaces.

Click “Choose RSS feed” to open the RSS Feed window.

You can also search by name and scroll through pages if the feed you want is not in front of you straight away.

Select the feed you want to use for your region and hit “finish” to close that window and return to the region editor.

 

The other sections in the editor already have some sample content, containing HTML for a bullet list of the number of items, as set in your chosen feed.
You are free to change it as much as you like.

There are 4 code boxes:
1 Header
2 RSS Item
3 Divider
4 Footer.

The header, divider & footer are ‘channel’ sections. They wrap around the RSS content itself and can pull in information about the feed itself, rather than the each items’ content.

The header & footer content will appear before and after the items list, respectively.
The divider is rarely used but its purpose is to sit between each item and will not appear before the first item or after the last item.

As per the default content, one popular option is to use the channel’s title as link text in the header with the channel’s link as the url.

The RSS item section is the main section, where each item’s content will be merged into.
You can hit the open brace character ‘{‘ to open the tag suggestions and choose which item tag’s content you want to pull into that section.

It is not uncommon to leave all of the channel sections empty and only use the items, where you are only using rich text, like copy, links and line-breaks.

If you are using a table to manage the structure, you can open the table in the header, close it in the footer, then open and close the rows and cells in the item section.

Once you are happy enough, hit finish to return to the regions window and find your region there.

You have the option to copy the region tag eg: {~region~myRssRegion~} to paste it into your message but you will have the ability to access the available regions directly from the editor.

Hit Close to close the RSS Regions window and return to the message editor.

To add the region into your message, you’ll need to add the region tag in your preferred spot on the canvas.

If you have already copied the region tag from the region window, simply paste it.
If not, type an open brace character ‘{‘ as you would for personalisation; the personalisation suggestions will appear as usual and this message’s region tags will be at the bottom. Click your region to add it to the canvas as you would any other personalisation.

Now you have an RSS feed integrated to your message.
The previews and the send tests will all merge the RSS content into your message allowing you to easily spot check and adjust how it appears without having to schedule a campaign.

You will be asked to save your message each time you click to test or preview.

Note: RSS is only accessible to you for the HTML code editor – which has a wysiwyg overlay (and the legacy ‘visual editor’).