What's New

What's New answers one question — what has been added to this hub lately? — by asking each of its plugins for the items in their component created inside a time period, then listing them by category at /whatsnew. It also publishes each of those categories as an RSS feed, which is where the Feed buttons a visitor sees actually lead. The visitor's side is described in Search.

There is no administrator screen. The component ships no admin controllers and no admin views, and its install migration deliberately removes it from the Components menu. Everything a manager decides about it is decided somewhere else — in the Plugin Manager, in a menu item, or in a module — and those three places are what this chapter covers.

Almost every hub wants it, and it takes about five minutes: enable the plugins for the content types you publish, put a What's New menu item in the main menu, and optionally drop the module on the front page. A hub that publishes a handful of resources a month gets a page members and outside readers can subscribe to, without anybody writing a newsletter. If your hub publishes nothing on a regular cadence, skip it — an empty What's New page is worse than none.

What it aggregates

Six plugins, in the whatsnew folder of Extensions > Plugins:

Plugin	Category on the page	What it lists
Whatsnew - Content	Articles	Published articles from the Content component.
Whatsnew - Events	Events	Events from the hub calendar.
Whatsnew - Knowledge Base	Knowledge Base	Published knowledge base articles.
Whatsnew - Publications	Publications	Published publication versions.
Whatsnew - Resources	Resources	Published resources, split into one sub-category per major resource type — tools, datasets, presentations and so on, exactly as the resource type list defines them.
Whatsnew - Wiki	Topic pages	Wiki pages.

None of them has any parameters. The only decision is whether each is enabled; disable one and its category disappears from the page, its counts from the sidebar, and its feed with it. Enabling all six and enabling none are the two ends of the range, and there is nothing in between to tune.

Nothing else is aggregated. Blogs, forum posts, questions and answers, groups, projects, collections, citations and wishlist items have no What's New plugin and never appear, however new they are.

Each plugin applies its own component's access rules, so two visitors can see different counts on the same page.

The page

/whatsnew shows a Category list down the left with a count beside each one, and the matching items on the right. Selecting a category restricts the page to it; the Resources category expands into its sub-categories. A Time period select and a Go button sit above.

With no category chosen, the page shows the top five items in each category and a See more results › link. Choose a category and it pages properly, using the hub's list length.

The URL carries the period as its first segment — /whatsnew/month — and a category is expressed as a prefix on it: /whatsnew/resources:month, /whatsnew/tools:month. That prefixed form is the string a menu item and the module both take.

The period

Value	Covers
week	The past week, ending now.
month	The past month, ending now. Used when nothing else is given.
quarter	The past three months.
year	The past year.
2024	Fiscal year 2024: 1 September 2023 to 31 August 2024.
c_2024	Calendar year 2024.

The Time period select offers the four rolling windows, then a fiscal year and a calendar year entry for each year back to 2002. A fiscal year appears in the list only once 1 October of that year has passed, so the current fiscal year is offered from October onwards.

The fiscal year runs September to August, which is fixed in the code and cannot be changed. So is the 2002 floor on the year lists.

The period a visitor arrives on comes, in order, from the URL, then from the active menu item's setting, then from the built-in default of month.

What a manager configures

Three things, none of them in this component's own screens. All three are reversible in a click, and none of them touches content: disabling a plugin hides a category, deleting the menu item hides the page, removing the module empties a template position. Nothing here can damage anything.

Which plugins run. Extensions > Plugins, filtered to the whatsnew folder. See Plugins.

A menu item. Create one of type What's New > Display results; see Menus. Without one the page still answers at /whatsnew, but nothing on the hub links to it and nobody finds it. Its Cat/Period field takes exactly the string described above — month, year, c_2023, or a category prefix such as resources:quarter — and becomes the page's starting period. Leave it blank for the past month across all categories.

The What's New module. mod_whatsnew puts a short list of recent items in a template position. Its parameters:

Parameter	Notes
CSS ID	An id for the module's wrapper, for styling.
Number of items	How many items to list. Five by default.
Feed link	Show or hide the RSS link in the module.
Category and period	The same prefixed string as the menu item. resources:month by default.
Tags	Show or hide each item's tags.
Cache, Cache time	Off by default; cache time is in minutes.

Place it under Extensions > Module Manager; see Modules.

Setting it up

Say the hub publishes resources and the occasional knowledge base article, and you want a What's New entry in the main menu covering the past month.

1. Go to Extensions > Plugins and filter the folder to whatsnew. Disable the plugins for content types this hub does not publish — on this hub, Events and Wiki. Their categories and feeds disappear at once.
2. Go to Menus and open the main menu.
3. Select New, and for the type choose What's New > Display results.
4. Leave Cat/Period blank. That gives the past month across every enabled category, which is what you want; fill it in only to pin the page to one category or a fixed year.
5. Save, then open /whatsnew on the site and check that the Category list holds only the types you left enabled, with sensible counts.

If a category shows a count of zero, that component has published nothing in the period — try Time period set to a year before concluding anything is wrong.

Feeds

Every category heading on the page carries a feed link, and that link is the component's RSS output for that category over the current period: /whatsnew/resources:month/feed.rss. The feed carries each item's title, link, date, category and author, with the description truncated to 300 characters, and it is limited the same way the page is — five items per category when no category is named, the hub's list length when one is.

These are the feeds a visitor is offered from the search results page. They are ordinary RSS and need no configuration; if a category's plugin is disabled, its feed stops existing along with its heading.

API

The component also answers /api/whatsnew, taking the same period and category strings. See the API reference.

Options

There are none. The component has no config.xml, no access.xml and no Options screen. Access to /whatsnew is whatever access its menu item has, and what appears on it is decided entirely by the plugins and by each item's own access rules.