Spotlights
Spotlights are curated content feeds displayed on your portal's homepage. They show your visitors timely, relevant content, such as product announcements, news articles, application notes, or internal updates, alongside the AI product knowledge experience.
Overview
Each portal can have multiple spotlight feeds. Every feed has its own content source, label, icon, and display settings. On the portal homepage, feeds appear as scrollable card rows, each clearly labeled with the feed name and icon. Visitors can click any card to open the linked content.
Feed Source Types
There are four ways to populate a spotlight feed:
RSS Feed
Connects to an RSS or Atom feed URL and pulls in items automatically
Web Page
ProductIQ visits a URL and automatically extracts news or content items from the page
Manual
You create each item by hand in the admin console
File Upload
You upload a document and ProductIQ extracts content items from it
Web Page is useful for sites that publish product news or announcements but do not have an RSS feed.
RSS Feed is the most common option for ongoing news streams — connect it once and it stays up to date automatically.
Manual is ideal for internal announcements, curated highlights, or one-off content items you want to control directly.
File Upload works well for processing press releases, product bulletins, or distributor newsletters uploaded as PDFs.
Creating a Feed
Navigate to Spotlights in the admin console.
Click Add Feed.
Configure the feed settings
Label
The name displayed above the feed on the portal, for example: "Latest News" or "Product Announcements"
Source Type
Choose Web Page, RSS Feed, Manual, or File Upload
Source URL
The web address to fetch (required for Web Page and RSS Feed types)
Color
An accent color for the feed header and item cards
Max Items
The maximum number of items to show from this feed
Refresh Interval
How often the feed checks for new content (in hours) — for Web Page and RSS Feed types
For Web Page and RSS feeds, DistiForge fetches the source immediately and populates the feed with its first batch of items.
Click Create Feed.
Keeping Feeds Fresh
For Web Page, RSS, and File Upload feeds, DistiForge refreshes content automatically based on the interval you set. When a portal visitor loads the dashboard, the system checks whether it is time to fetch new content. If the interval has passed, a refresh runs in the background - visitors see the current items immediately and any new items appear on their next visit.
Forcing an Immediate Refresh
If you want to pull in new content right away without waiting for the next scheduled refresh:
Reordering Feeds
The order feeds appear on the portal homepage is up to you:
Go to Spotlights.
Drag the feeds into the order you want.
Changes are saved automatically.
Managing Items in a Feed
Within any feed, the Items panel shows all current content with titles, dates, and sources.
To remove an item, click the delete icon next to it. Note that for auto-fetched feeds, deleted items may reappear on the next refresh if they are still present in the source.
How Spotlights Appear on the Portal
Spotlights are displayed on the portal's main page as a scrollable section below the AI search bar. Each feed appears as a labeled card row with its icon and accent color. Visitors see up to the maximum number of items you configured for each feed, and can click any card to visit the linked content.
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