Uniqueness

We're going to have several news articles created in this manner at, probably, fairly random intervals. One thing we must make sure we do is to have a unique URL associated with each auto-news update. Of course, a timestamp springs readily to mind.

When we invoke the External Method we need to tell it which of the many news articles that might be lying around it should be processing and by far the easiest way to do that is to pass it as a normal HTTP GET argument: ...?news_id=*unique_id*.

There are some more Plone-ish solutions involving appending to the URL directly, eg.: .../*unique_id* (as seen here) but I haven't explored those.

Auto-Publish

News Items are in Plone's default workflow so we need to be able to publish the article in the same call. That's pretty straight-forward.