Theming Guide

RSS Feed Widget

⚠️ Before we begin…

Pockets, and their associated widgets, represent our classic design experience. For a more streamlined experience, with deeper layout customization and expanded widget capabilities, we recommend upgrading to our Layout Editor.

📝 NOTE: Pockets only display in legacy layouts, and will not function in Layout Editor layouts.

This article describes adding and using the RSS Feed widget for Pockets. A more feature-rich version of this widget is available in Layout Editor:

Learn about Layout Editor in the What is Layout Editor? section.
Learn about the Layout Editor version of this widget in Layout Editor Widgets.

Overview

You can use the RSS Feed widget to promote blog content and important news feeds in your Higher Logic Vanilla (Vanilla) community. After you configure the widget with an RSS feed's URL, the thumbnails, titles, and descriptions are automatically populated from the feed.

Set up the RSS Feed widget

Open the Dashboard and navigate to the Pockets page; select Add Pocket.
Select RSS Feed as the Type and add a name to your pocket so you can easily identify it later.
Type or paste the URL of the feed and, optionally, specify a Title, Subtitle, and Description.

📝 NOTE: The RSS feed URL must return the Title, Link, and Description to work properly.

Screen Shot 2021-06-23 at 10.04.04 AM.png

Next, you will have to set the Placement & Conditions of the pocket. See working with pockets.

✔️ TIP: Make sure that you try out various locations on your staging site to decide which looks best before setting it up on your production site.

RSS Feed widget examples

Subcommunities

Point users to your subcommunity homepages.

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Widget display settings

The widget and its contents inherit their properties from the Global Styles settings in Theme Editor. These settings determine the appearance of the widgets on your community pages.

📝 NOTE: Currently, it is not possible to format (i.e., change the properties) the widget elements individually.

The widgets in your Vanilla community inherit most of their properties from the Global Styles settings. Some examples of this that are on several widgets are:

Background color is inherited from the Background setting.
Title, Description, and article link colors are inherited from the Text setting.
View All link and username link colors are inherited from the Links setting.
Subtitle and hover-over colors are inherited from the Brand Color setting.