[Solved] Display one category on home page of site (forum installed elsewhere)

mummypig

Hi

I'm new to vanilla and am trying to decide the best way to display news on the home page of our website. It is in the process of being set up at the moment and, as it's a voluntary organisation for those with limited mobility, I'm trying to keep it as simple as possible.

We will have the vanilla forum installed at http://example.com/forum

I would like to use one category as 'news' and display this on our homepage http://example.com

Could embed vanilla be used to display a single category in this manner,? Or would this work better as an RSS feed (you guessed it, I don't know how RSS works - yet - but I will soon!!)?

Also, does anyone know how well embed vanilla works with screen readers for those with limited vision? Some of our members use these and I'm not sure that embededded items work for them.

Sorry if this is a really lame question - any help would be most appreciated :)

sahotataran

on your dashboard go to HOMEPAGE
and add the homepage link as categories/news
or in place of news you can display the category you want to display

mummypig

No... that's not what I meant. I meant the homepage for my entire site - not just the homepage for the forum.

I want to be able to feed the 'news' category to the main page of my site. Can I do that with embed vanilla, and show only 'the news' category? Has anyone done this sucessfully?

x00

you can use .htaccess to do that or

the feed is at
categories/news/feed.rss

you can use the api like so
categories/news.json
categories/news.xml

x00

you can use .htaccess to do that

Say you had the forum folder in yout root, you could put this .htaccess in your root.

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
   RewriteEngine On
   # RewriteBase /
	RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?yoursite\.com$ 
	RewriteRule (.*) /forum/$1 
</IfModule>

then then set the homepage link as above.

or

RedirectMatch 301 (.*) http://yoursite.com/forum/$1

mummypig

It's okay - I worked out that I could just use an RSS feed and make it look like a fake blog.

However, I don't believe any of the solutions are accessible for people using readers, because the reader can only 'see' what is in the HTML file, and not what is embedded.

So, I either stick with the current method of editing the html for every news item, or I accept that those who are vision impaired (which will include a significant proportion of our target audience) won't be able to see 'news' items on the front page, but will be able to read them in the forum.

Hmm... quandary :)

Thanks for your help though!

x00

Well for one if you want it on you front page then put it there. If you are using a JavaScript reader, then you might use a server bases solution.

Second, rss isn't html and it is designed for reading. You can but the syndicated link in your meta. Also you can check if it is syndicated request and supply the feed in place.

mummypig

I rejected that answer in error - sorry!

I already worked out the best way to add the RSS to my front page and am happy with that.

My remaining issue was around whether or not people who were vision impaired and using screen readers would be able to see the RSS feed or not. I know RSS isn't html (obviously) and what I said was that most screen readers read only what is in the html file and ignore items embedded i.e. javascript.

Hence, javascript commands that rely on mouseovers are useless, particularly seeing as vision impaired users tend to stick with keyboard commands and tab to links.

My concern was therefore that anything embedded or relying on javascript would be useless for a high proportion of my current audience.

That said, I've heard that ChromeVox is particularly accessible and may work with RSS feeds, so I'm going to test that out.

Thanks for your help :)