FlatPlan handles the distribution and display of your content. All we need from you is the content delivered via an RSS/Atom feed.
The feed that comes as standard with your CMS will be a sufficient basis on which to build your FlatPlan specific feed. See below for a breakdown of our feed requirements.
We need your feed to be valid, well-structured and contain everything we need. By this, we mean:
NB — custom blocks (e.g. “read next”), unrelated to article content can be supported — please get in touch for their specification.
FlatPlan supports RSS 2.0 or Atom
We fetch your feed regularly to check for new and updated content — to help facilitate this we require a minimum of 40 items (articles) per page.
All content, whether plain text or html, should be encoded using UTF-8 character encoding.
FlatPlan requires the following namespaces
Type | URL | Namespace |
---|---|---|
DCMI Metadata Terms | http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/ | dc |
RDF Site Summary 1.0 Modules: Content | http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/ | content |
FlatPlan format extension | https://wearemathematics.co.uk/flatplan-feedspec/ | flatplan |
Media syndication | http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/ | media |
Specifies XML document version and character code
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
Specifies RSS version and namespaces.
<rss version="2.0" xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/" xmlns:flatplan="https://wearemathematics.co.uk/flatplan-feedspec/" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/" > ... </rss>
A description of your website
Sub Element | Required | Explanation | Example |
---|---|---|---|
| ✔ | Title of the publication (HTML not supported) | The Daily News |
| ✔ | URL of the publication | https://dailynews.com/ |
| ✔ | Published date and time (must comply with RFC822) | Sun, 14 Oct 2019 05:00:00 GMT |
| ✔ | The last date and time the content of the feed was updated | Mon, 15 Oct 2019 07:23:00 GMT |
| ✔ | Short code that identifies the natural language used in the channel - guide | en |
| ✔ | Element to contain all article data (explained below) | See below |
Describes each article
Sub Element | Required | Explanation | Example |
---|---|---|---|
| ✔ | Unique numerical identifier of the article | 098765 |
| ✔ | Title of the article (HTML encoding is not supported) | FlatPlan launches another publication on Apple News |
| ✔ | Canonical URL of article | https://wearemathematics.co.uk/articles/ |
| ✔ | Date and time the article was published (must comply with RFC822) | Mon, 15 Oct 2019 07:23:00 GMT |
| ✔ | A URL of an image to represent the article. Will be used in the channel's index page, and as the lead image of the article (send largest available version) | https://wearemathematics.co.uk/articles/applenews.jpg |
| ✔ | Author of the article | A. N. Other |
| ✔ | All elements of the article body including text, images, media and embeds | See below |
| ✔ | The introduction text to the article - this will be used on the article page and in the channel index pages | The latest publication makes full use of Apple News format with minimal effort thanks to FlatPlan |
| ✔ | The top level category the article pertains to | Fashion |
| Template name (the use of this element will depend on the level of integration) | Feature | |
| Article sponsor text and logo | Brought to you by Apple | |
| Image gallery content including caption data | See example feed |
<content:encoded>
We require the feed to contain the full body of the article including all content types. Our system will parse all article related content modules providing they are wrapped in the appropriate tags. This includes paragraph styles, images, video (youtube, vimeo or native palyer) and social media embeds. The feed sample holds examples of these.
Please note, all “class” and “style” data is ignored as templating is handled within our system and takes no cues for the alignments or layout of the content that may apply to your website.
It is also possible to pass gallery content via a custom tag found in the feed sample.
Ensure the following:
<figure>
tag inside a <p>
tag.<content:encoded>
and is used to describe the article is not also included in <content:encoded>
(e.g. do not add the image contained in <media:thumbnail>
)View a sample RSS document on Github
Disallowed Characters
If characters which are not allowed by XML specification are included in a document, we can not parse them correctly. For more information about XML specification, please see http://www.w3.org/XML/Core/#Publications.
Date Format of <pubDate>
The value of <pubDate>
must be specified in accordance with RFC822 (https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc0822.txt).
Please specify a timezone using one of the following notations:
For example, the following are correct notation to express “May 1, 2019 15:00:00 (PST)“:
For language settings follow these guidelines for support codes
http://www.rssboard.org/rss-language-codes
Supported image types are JPEG (.jpeg
or .jpg
) GIF, or PNG.
The minimum size of the image must be 300 px wide x 300 px high.
The aspect ratio (width ÷ height) must be between 0.5 and 3.0.
Ensure your servers can accept “get” and “head” requests. We use these to pull the article data and check for updates.
Find out more about FlatPlan
More information