Silverstripe HackerNews - A Tech News Slider

News scrolling banner (animated) for Silverstripe CMS. The extension can automatically fetch tech news/posts by using Y Combinator's Hacker News API.

Working demo on iloveunix.com at site's footer.

Requirements

• Compatible with Silverstripe versions 4 and 5
• Bootstrap (optional, e.g. silverstripe-bootloader)

Installation

Composer

composer require minimalic/silverstripe-hackernews

Rebuild DB

Rebuild DB by appending dev/build?flush=all to your website's URL or by using shell:

vendor/bin/sake dev/build "flush=all"

Fetch Hacker News

Fetch first news by appending dev/tasks/FetchHackerNewsTask to your website's URL or by using shell (from website's root directory):

vendor/bin/sake dev/tasks/FetchHackerNewsTask

or (if sake is not available):

php vendor/silverstripe/framework/cli-script.php dev/tasks/FetchHackerNewsTask

Bootstrap extension (optional)

Bootstrap (CSS library) isn't required, but this extension is using Bootstrap's markups for templating. Own Bootstrap implementation can be used as well as extensions like silverstripe-bootloader:

composer require minimalic/silverstripe-bootloader

Usage

Simply put $HackerNews inside your template, for example Footer.ss:

<div class="container-fluid g-0 f-hacker-news">
    $HackerNews
</div>

Configuration

Configuration options (e.g. app/_config/hackernews.yml):

minimalic\HackerNews\Tasks\FetchHackerNewsTask:
  posts_to_load: 40
  email_message_enable: true
  email_message_nightly: true
  email_message_from:
    server@domain.com: 'Server Name'
  email_message_to:
    my.mail@domain.com: 'My Name'

minimalic\HackerNews\HackerNewsBanner:
  banner_speed: 60

Automatic daily news fetch

Set up cronjob (shell, as web user):

crontab -e

To fetch news every 6 hours starting at 0:42 local server time type in:

42 */6 * * * ~/mywebsite/vendor/bin/sake dev/tasks/FetchHackerNewsTask

(the ~/mywebsite/ is a relative path from your web user starting point - you can also use an absolute path like /var/www/mywebsite/)

Contribution

To compile SCSS to CSS install sass, nodemon and postcss by using npm and run (developing only, shell):

cd vendor/minimalic/silverstripe-hackernews/client/src/
npm run-script watch

License

See License

Copyright (c) 2024, minimalic.com - Sebastian Finke All rights reserved.