The latest release of the News Feeds module has made it through the project release cycle. Peter Donker made the announcement on 8/24/2008. He has chosen to completely rewrite the module to provide us in the Community with some very interesting options moving forward with this module.
The first one is Aggregation
The module uses a new version of the RSS Toolkit located at CodePlex. This toolkit allows the module to aggregate feeds of different types together as one feed.
The next one is Caching
They have made some very interesting choices in how they cache the rss feeds for use within the module. They now store information on disk in the form of the aggregated feed as an xml document as well as storing information in a SQL table with when the feed needs to be refreshed and other information.
The next was Transformation
Previously the XML/XSL transformation was handled by the standard ASP.NET XML component. Now this module uses the same mechanism as the XML module and allows for parameters to be passed to the XSL style sheet.
The next was Displaying
In older versions the news feed module did not display till it had successfully downloaded all the content to display. This new version uses AJAX to allow for quicker loading of the page and better management of the experience for the end user.
The last note is on Security
If you turn on caching of the module and you use an internal page to display a feed. It is important to remember that the feed that is cached will display the information for the user that was logged in when the feed was first called, so if that user has higher privileges then you want to display information for that may inadvertently get cached.
More reading
Peter Donker’s Blog post
News Feed Download
News Feed Discussion Forum
