The term syndication originates from traditional publishing, where an author would send his article for publication to many newspapers or magazines at the same time.

On the web, sites can also automatically exchange articles, but for simplicity, they usually exchange titles with hyperlinks to the original article.

For example, the Bulgarian language edition of Social Rights Bulgaria syndicates the English language edition, and vice versa. You can see this on the right side of every page, just under the navigation menus. Occasionally, you may also see links to major events, sites of partners, etc.

Finding the location of the syndication feed on other websites

Not all sites support syndication, since they must provide a syndication feed. A syndication feed is a special web page in which headlines are specially structured to be easy to import into your site. This special web page is often called "RSS backend" or "RSS feed", where RSS means "Really Simple Syndication". You may also see an icon where is written the letters "RSS" or "XML" in white, on an orange background ( ).

All sites hosted on NGO-bg are using Spip and therefore support syndication. The rest of this article explains the syndication features of NGO-bg sites.

NGO-bg sites offer different syndication feeds

You can choose to syndicate the global headlines from a NGO-bg site or only the headlines from a specific section (rubrique). By default, the orange "RSS" icon, located in the lower-left corner of the screen, provides the link to the syndication feed for the global headlines.

Here are examples of syndication feeds for the fictive site, mysite.ngo-bg.org:

 http://www.mysite.ngo-bg.org/backend.php3

This is the default syndication feed. It will show the latest headlines of all the articles of the site, in all languages.

 http://www.mysite.ngo-bg.org/backend_bg
 http://www.mysite.ngo-bg.org/backend_en
 http://www.mysite.ngo-bg.org/backend_fr

Such links are shortcuts to the global syndication feed of a site, but only for the headlines of articles in a specific language.

 http://www.mysite.ngo-bg.org/backend.php3?id_rubrique=21

When the section (rubrique) is explicitly given, then only articles from this section will be provided. This is useful if a site publishes two types of news, such as International and National news, but you would like to syndicate only the National news.

There are also cases where a section has a special keyword that provides a special syndication feed for the theme of the keyword.

When this is possible, a second "RSS" icon will appear in the lower-left corner of the page.

Importing headlines from a NGO-bg site into your site

If you are using the Spip content management system:

1. Login to the private area of the site
2. Go to the "Site Edit" tab (upper-left corner of the screen)
3. Then go in "Referenced sites"
4. And click on "Reference a new site"

Enter the requested information, and don’t forget to click on the "Syndication" option before submitting the site. Next to the syndication option, there is a help icon that will provide more information.

If you have any questions, do not hesitate to contact us: irbf@ngo-bg.org