2009 RSS/ News Ticker v.2

The 2009 RSS/News Ticker v.2 is a complete solution to display latest titles or RSS news on the website. This ticker can be used as a teaser on the main page of the website. Main feature of this ticker is the display of description of the news in a tool tip.

The ticker has a settings.xml file. From this file you can set from where the widget is taking the data. It can be local file (feedUrl='news.xml' in our sample) or it can be an RSS feed (feedUrl='www.sportsbooks.ro/sports/en/articles/mlb.xml' in our sample). Please do not include the http since this is compensate by the parser. To activate the widget to get data from remote feed, just change the useRemoteFeed to "yes".

useRemoteFeed='no'
localFeedUrl='mlb.xml'
remoteFeedUrl='www.sportsbooks.ro/sports/en/articles/mlb.xml'

For the local XML file, you can make a normal RSS structure. The widget would display a title and an URL to the article. The image can be imported from description if used a regular expression (img src). You can add all the items like in the following sample or just title and link.

<item>
<title>Animal activists decry expanded elephant displays</title>
<link>http://www.domain.com/articles/animal-activits.html</link>
<pubDate>Thursday, June 18, 2009 11:54 AM</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[<img src="images/elefant.jpg" width="60" height="60" align="right" />Seven lumbering elephants four of them newcomers are the star attractions in the San Diego Zoo s biggest, most costly expansion in its 90-plus years. They are big animals that make big mess. Watch them now dance.]]></description>
</item>

The package includes a small php parser.

Scrolling speed and animation time can be set in the XML file.

scrollSpeed='2'
animationTime='1'

In the settings.xml file you can set the following parameters: width, height, background color and background shadow color of the ticker, the option to set the distance between the ticker and top side. This space is dedicated to the tool tip description. Graphics and fonts can be changed inside the library of the main fla.

widgetWidth='590'
widgetHeight='30'
widgetBgColor='#0f0f0f'
showWidgetBgShadow='yes'
widgetBgShadowColor='#000000'
tickerMarginTop='100'

To change how the news title would display, we have a set of options in the settings.xml. The background corner radius, the arrow and shadow color can be changed in the XML file. The radius of the over state can be set in XML. By default, it's set to 10.

In the same group of settings, we added options to set the space for news, left padding and top margin of the title. Another great setting is the title chars limitation. By default, it's set to 50. In this way it's possible to limit the number of chars for the news titles that are to long to display in one line. This next setting is important for the URL of the news. By default it's set to _blank.

titleBgRoundCornerRadius='10'
newsPaddingLeft='10'
newsSpace='20'
titleTopMargin='2'
titleCharLimitation='50'
linkOpenTarget='_blank'

The next group of settings is dedicated to set the tool tip description. Tooltip width, height, corner radius, background color, background alpha and shadow color can be customized from the XML file. Set the thumb width, height, border width and color from the XML settings.

One of the most important options is the description chars limitation (descCharLimitation). By default, it's set to 220 characters.

From the XML file, the tooltip date and description color can be edited.

tooltipWidth='360'
tooltipHeight='80'
tooltipCornerRadius='10'
tooltipBgColor='#ffffff'
tooltipBgAlpha='0.8'
tooltipBgShadowColor='#000000'

thumbWidth='60'
thumbHeight='60'
thumbBorderWidth='1'
thumbBorderColor='#666666'

descCharLimitation='220'
tooltipdateColor='#666666'
tooltipDescColor='#000000'

The next group of settings are created to customize the parser for your RSS structure. The parent node name, parent node name, title node, date and and description node can be edited to fit most of the RSS feeds structure.

parentNodeName='channel'
childNodeName='item'
titleNodeName='title'
dateNodeName='pubDate'
descriptionNodeName='description'

The news has 2 options. One in normal and another in over state, where the background and font color can be set .

<mouseOutState titleColor='#ffffff' titleBgColor='#0f0f0f' arrowColor='#76c801' />
<mouseOverState titleColor='#ffffff' titleBgColor='#76c801' arrowColor='#000000' />