Progress

What have we done?

It has been a week since the Alpha Demos and we have made some substantial progress! We have completely implemented the ability to search for articles on the app. If you want to search for stories about basketball or even yourself you can do it! 

At first we thought it was going to be difficult to implement a search method on the app. We also had to take into consideration the line between an mobil app and the actual website. We want our application to be a simple and straight forward way to obtain the news. Thus we questioned having the ability to search for articles. However, we since it was something the client requested we went forward. 

Add the ability to search was actually quite straight forward. We have already installed all of the code necessary to retrieve stories from the RSS feed. So all we had to do was figure out how to search the feed itself for articles containing the search keywords. We found that all you had to do was attached the query words to the end of the RSS feed link. This then filtered the data by searching for articles that contained those key words. We used that link just as we do in the home page to grab those stories and display them in a list view on a new activity. 

The same process will be applied when we organize the stories by section (i.e. sports, arts, opinions). We can search the articles based on a category/section tag the RSS feed attaches to them. 

We March On..

With only a few weeks left in the term we still have a lot of work ahead of us. We are still struggling with accessing the images/thumbnails that correspond the the article. We are hoping to talk to ITS within the next week to talk about how we can obtain those images. We have researched and found that we can add code to the Word Press website featured.php to attached the images to the RSS feed. However, we have a lack of understanding on how the site works so our hopes is that ITS (who manages the site) can assist us. 

We are also wanting ITS to install a plug in on the website that will allows for push notification to automatically be sent when an article is published. We have done the work necessary to handle a push notification using Google Cloud Messaging within our app and believe that the best way to implement push notifications with Word Press would be through the use of this plugin. 

Thanks for tuning in!!