I’m continuing work on the News Dashboard and now have three different Web Parts functional, though I’m not done with the design work. In the upper left is the CMS News Web Part, which gets an RSS feed of CMS news stories that now include images in the RSS (though you’ll note the first story doesn’t have an image – still working on the handling for that case). Eventually, this Web Part will let you roll over each of the stories and it will display the summary at the top with the image from the story.

Off to the right is a more generic RSS aggregator for non-CMS news (though I’m using a CMS news feed in this test case). This and the CMS News Web Part will be styled so that they appear like the alternating grey rows on the CMS’s front page. Speaking of that Front Page, you might have noticed that it now has an active RSS link in most browsers. I added a feed of Front Page News today.

Below is the Video Web Part. This is designed specifically for use with Middlebury’s streaming media server: MiddTube. You just enter the name of the video that you’ve saved to your (or another) account and the Web Part will become a player for that video. The neat thing about these Web Parts is that they’re fully user-configurable and moveable around the screen.

I just have two more Web Parts to create: Blogs and Events. Once those are done I’ll start adding the styling so that this looks more production ready, but I’m guessing that this will be ready for testing near the end of this week or early into the next.