Everything that needs to be changed in a newsletter in Stripo can be changed with the drag/drop interface that Stripo offers. Except for one thing, and that is the automatic RSS news feed from the website.

This article describes the way to make changes to the news feeds in Stripo.

Sections #

Most news updates have more then one section with news items. These items are pulled in automatically from a website and need to be added only once. When a new newsletter is created for a new site, we always use a news feed from an existing site to build and test the new newsletter. Once the new site is live we need to change the news feed to make sure the correct content from the correct website is pulled in.

RSS feed and Format #

The newsfeed that is used is a so called RSS feed. Every category and every tag in a WordPress site has a RSS feed. This RSS feed is setup in such a way that it contains meta information like the following:

• the title of the article
• the publishing date
• the author
• the link to the article
• the featured image of the article
• the excerpt

An RSS feed can be manipulated with tools to change the content of the feed but on our sites the RSS is fine for our newsletters.

Newsletters #

In general, the newsletters we create have 1, 2 or 3 sections where we pull in news items from the website. So we need 3 references to the RSS feed to do this.

Section 1 – Featured Story / Spotlight Story
Section 2 – News articles
Section 3 – More news articles

See the image below.

How to check and change the RSS feed
#

As mentioned, everything in the newsletter can be changed by the Stripo drag and drop editor, except for the RSS feed. To check or change the feed you have to go in to the Stripo Code editor. This can be done as follows.

As always, MAKE SURE TO FIRST CREATE A COPY of the newsletter before you start modifying the newsletter, especially when you change code. One mistake can have consequenses, not only for the newsfeed but also the design and structure.

First open the newsletter you want to work with. Then click in the right top corner on the Code editor icon .
Click the icon, your screen will now switch to the code editor and half of your screen will display the HTML code.

Now click somewhere in the HTML code to select the HTML section.

Then use Control-F to open the Find box.  You will see the Find box on the right of your screen.

Inside the find box type: lp-rss-url.

The tool will search for sentences with this string of text. The lp-rss-url string stands for the ‘Laposta RSS URL’. Remember that later on we export the Stripo newsletter and import this in Laposta. Laposta will then generate the news items from the URL that is set in Stripo, and pulls in the actual news items.

You will then see a line of text similar to this:

This means that news items from the Featured Story category from the ssw-americas.com site are pulled in. It starts with item 1 and pulls in just 1 item (“1-1”)

If you look for the second lp-rss-url you see a line similar to this:

This line pulls in items from the news category and it pulls in item 2, 3, 4 and 5 (in total 4 news items)

Lastly you find the third lp-rss-url and it shows:

This section pulls in article 6, 7, 8 and 9.

If you want to make changes you need to do this is in these lines.

Do you want to change the feed, go to the site and cateory you want to use. Then add “/feed” behind the URL and paste it in the newsletter.

If you want to change the number of news items that need to be pulled in, vary with the number behind lp-rss-range.

Notes

1. For newsletters with less news items or less logos in the sidebar, you may vary with the number of items that are pulled in.
2. We used two different sections of news in one newsletter to make the newsletter more attractive and to have more space for ‘commercial items’.
3. Always make a copy first when you want to make changes to a newsletter. A small error in the code may result in a corrupt newsletter that you have to rebuild from scratch.