Google News & Plone

Google News is a great service to follow news. A customer have asked me to submit their Plone web site to Google News.

Documentation

Google news ask your site to respect some constraints. Once you have read it you understand Plone needs one thing: Article URL need to finish with (at least) three-digit numbers and dot html. The digit must not start with 200 or 199. Next if you want to have a better updating support you have to submit a "google news site map" which has some specifics tags.

collective.googlenews

I have created collective.googlenews to let a plone site be google news compliant. Once the add-on has been installed and activated, News Item urls will ends with  '-4342.html' for example.

You can check this blog, it is google news compliant !

This add-on also provide a sitemap view for topic, so you can submit it to googlenews over a topic. For example "http://toutpt.makina-corpus.org/news/aggregator/@@googlenews-sitemap.xml"

Some other details has been included in this view:

• no more than 1000 items are returned
• items must have been published in the last two days
• items are ordered on the effective date (reversed)

This add-on can be configured to support other content types throw the control panel.

It has been published as usual on pypi and plone.org.