This document lays out the options for how timeline content can be ordered in your app, and some considerations for ordering your content most effectively. Timelines are the Pugpig terminology for what you might refer to as section fronts/pages.

What are the options for driving the order of content in a timeline?

Curation can happen either in the Pugpig CMS:

• Manually, by logging in and reordering content (this is not common)
• Using our Timeline Layouts product

 Or - the most common case - if you are already curating in your own CMS, we can receive a feed(s) determining the curation for the app. Often this feed (or feeds) will be separate from the feed that actually provides the content for us to ingest. It might: 

• Define the order things should appear in the timeline (or this could just be based on the order in your feed)
• Define layouts and content overrides (e.g. a section-specific headline, selecting certain articles to have a specific presentation, such as a larger image layout, or being presented side-by-side with another article card)
• Include ad placements and other content types (such as a sports widget, and headers), not just articles

Out of the box we support RSS ordering and the ArcXP JSON PageBuilder Curator. Alternatively we can implement something for you if you want us to use a different type of feed.

If you use one of the above feed-driven forms of curating your content, it will usually be possible to override this in the Pugpig CMS, however doing so would mean freezing any updates to the affected articles.

Considerations for content ordering

We're always open to hearing about how to best order your content. Here are two common options for ordering content in your apps:

By date

By default, when we ingest your RSS feeds they'll honour the current order of the RSS feeds which are commonly set up by date in reverse chronological order. This means that the top article in the feed will be the latest article shown in the app. This is the simplest and usually least effort option for setting up ordering on timelines. 

Note that not all feeds are ordered by date, we can choose to either honour the RSS order or configure it by date.

By setting the curation of the flatplan to ‘Manual Top’, any new article that is syndicated by the feed will automatically be added to the top of the timeline. This means that any pinned article will be pushed below it but you can go back into Express and drag and drop the article to the top of the flatplan.

By rank

For when more control of ordering is needed on a timeline, we can order by post rank. For this, it'll require some indication on the RSS feed to inform us which order we should show the articles in. See example below:

<pugpig:page_rank>23</pugpig:page_rank>

For example in context, see example (1) below. We can then interpret this order for your timelines.

Grouping content

In addition to feed ordering, our apps allow content to be grouped and a mixture of these two approaches are commonly used. 

By feed

We are often supplied with one feed that contains all articles. If this feed indicates relevant groupings of content e.g a section for each post, then we can use this information to create timelines based on sections. This could either be done via a dynamic timeline (a timeline that is powered by a search, normally on sections or authors) or if a more curated option is required we can build out individual timelines based on one section where needed. Within these groupings you can choose to order the content by date or rank. See example (1) below.

Alternatively, you could provide an RSS feed for each section/category. We can ingest these feeds and set up the relevant mappings in the same way as the above

By section

Similarly, it is very common to want to group your article content by section/category within the same timeline this can also be achieved using a information provided to us on the feed. We can then configure these to group by specific sections and order by date or rank within them. See example of how a section/category may be sent in the feed:

<category><![CDATA[Life]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[News]]></category>

Example (1) in context:

<item>
	<title>
		<![CDATA[This is the post title]]>
	</title>
	<link>https://www.pugpig.com/article/this-is-the-post-title</link>
	<description>
		<![CDATA[This is the post summary/description/summary]]>
	</description>
	<category>
		<![CDATA[Section name 1]]>
	</category>
	<category>
		<![CDATA[Section name 2]]>
	</category>
	<pubDate>Mon, 03 Jun 2024 12:00:50 +0100</pubDate>
	<guid isPermaLink="false">2433685</guid>
	<dc:creator>
		<![CDATA[Pugpig Team]]>
	</dc:creator>
	<content:encoded>
		<![CDATA[<p>Lots of article content here</p>]]>
	</content:encoded>
	<media:thumbnail url="https://images.pugpig.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/image.jpg" width="1349" height="900" />
	<pugpig:issue>349</pugpig:issue>
	<pugpig:page_rank></pugpig:page_rank>
	<updated>Tue, 04 Jun 2024 09:46:34 +0100</updated>
</item>