How To Syndicate Content

Threespot Support

Syndicating content between websites is a powerful communication tool, allowing you to share content with other sites, as well as bringing content from other sites into your own. In this tutorial, Threespot Support Team member Bob Rose takes you through the basics of getting your content out there for other sites to use and bringing content into your own site from others.
Syndicating your content is a little more involved than simply setting up an RSS feed, as it involves a two-step process, but it will allow a little more flexibility than using straight RSS, in that you’ll be able to selectively share the content with other sites, and they’ll be able to selectively pull content they wish to use into their own site.

Here are the basics:

Step 1: Create a Syndication Category for outbound content from your site to be placed into

- Log-on to your site's admin interface and go to Configure | Syndication Categories.

- Select the “Add a Category” link in the upper-right

- Give the new category a name, such as “my_site_name Content” (where my_site_name is the name of your site)

- Enter a brief description for the new category

- Save your category



Step 2: Publishing Content to the New Syndication Category

The next step is to place content into your newly defined category so that it becomes available to other sites.

- Log-on to the your site and open the content item you want to place into your syndication channel

- The following content types can be syndicated: Articles; Events; Press Releases; Promo Ads

- Open any existing items of the aforementioned types that you want to syndicate

- From the content item’s detail page, select the “Syndication” tab

- Choose an option for syndication (Not/Read-only/Editable)

- Place a check-mark in the “my_site_name Content” box and publish the item.

Technically speaking, unless you are an admin on multiple sites, your work is essentially done at this point. You don't have the ability to make other admins pick your content up. However, they cannot add it unless they know it's there. So inform other admins that you've made a new syndicated content category so that they know they can add it to their site if they wish.




Step 3: Setting up a site to retrieve content from a remote site's syndication category.

This next step goes through the process of bringing syndicated content IN to a website.

- Login to your administrative page and go to Manage | Website.

- Click the name of the site you want to have subscribe to a new category (most people will only see one site--their own--in this list. If you're an admin on multiple sites, you'll be presented with a list of all of the sites you can administer, so you need to pick the one that is to receive the new content).

- On thel site detail page, select the “Syndication Categories” tab

- Place a check-mark in the box for the syndication category or categories you wish to receive content over.

- Save your new site setting

– Repeat for other sites, as needed



Step 4: Pull syndicated content into a site

Once you've set up your site to retrieve content from a given syndication category, you now need to actually add the content items in that category to your site.

- Log-on to the site you want to put syndicated content onto (you will need to log-on to each site individually to do this)

- Navigate to Manage | Content | {type of content you want to add}

- You will see 3-tabs. On Articles, for example you see: “My Articles”, “Syndicated Articles” and “Inactive Syndicated Articles”

- Staying with the Articles example for a moment, select the “Syndicated Articles” tab – this is where subscribed content will appear (the “Inactive Syndicated…” tab contains items previously syndicated, then removed)

- Locate the item you want to add to the site and click the “Add to my site” link just under the item’s description

- The content piece will now be added to the site

Be sure to refresh your page after adding the item, or it will not appear in the list of content immediately!



That’s it – you can continually add items to your site, selectively choosing what to send into the syndication channel…
From the other side of this equation, site admins can review content pieces that have been placed into the syndication channel and pick and choose what to add.

This is more flexible than using RSS tags to push out content, as RSS is an “all-or-nothing” option, meaning that if you place something into an RSS tag and the receiving site is set to include it, they will get all RSS content and will not have the ability to pick and choose what they want to appear on their site.