'Blogroll' style widget with folders

[AramZS]

Ability to show Blogroll, show by folder, show with alerts as their own tab.

[boonebgorges]

Consider as part of implementing PF blocks

[boonebgorges]

I've spent some time looking at this. I think it's too hard and too niche to build right now. Here's a summary of my thoughts for future review:

• We would not build this as a classic WP widget, but as a block. This makes it a bit more complex to build, in particular on the admin side of things.
• In 2024, people don't use RSS in like they once did. In fact, many people won't know what RSS is. This limits the utility of a blogroll based on Subscribed Feeds.
• With pf_feed items, we store the feed URL. This might look like 'http://blog.sucuri.net/feed'. We also collect the name of the site, which we get from the feed headers. This might look like 'Securi Blog'. IMO this is not enough to build a meaningful blogroll, since clicking the links would take you to the feed URL. Some modern browsers don't have native handlers for RSS (Firefox, for example, forces a download, while Chrome shows you the file as raw text). This is bound to be confusing for most users. So a minimal version of a Blogroll probably needs to have the "publication" URL. This might be something like http://blog.securi.net. The problem is that many/most feeds don't make this information available. We could use some heuristics to figure it out: feed URLs that look like WP can be parsed in a certain way, and we may be able to guess that the parent directory of a feed is the proper "publication" URL (eg https://example.com/foo/bar/rss.xml becomes https://example.com/foo/bar/). But this is subject to error, and will probably need some sort of override mechanism for manually entering the URL when editing the Subscribed Feed in the Dashboard.
• Related, we will probably want to have display options that allow people to show, for example, separate "feed" and "site" links (or whatever). So:

- Securi Blog [Site] [Feed]
- Washington Post [Site] [Feed]

• The original ticket had a suggestion for showing "alerts as their own tab". But "alerts" will not be meaningful to non-admin users. Instead, we probably want to filter out items with alerts - ie broken feeds - before building the blogroll markup.
• In the early days of blogging, it was common to have a blogroll in the sidebar. For modern users of PressForward, it seems to me that the most common use of a "blogroll" would be something like: an About page that describes the sources for the current site. We should build this tool with that use case in mind. Using blocks is one step in that direction, since blocks can be used in regular post content. But it also suggests that we may different display options, such as the ability to show (for example) the date/title of the most recent item pulled from that feed.

So, in short, it's a pretty large amount of work to build something that is even minimally viable for a specific use case. Let's explore this in the future when we have a partner who can articulate such a use case.