Feeds and Notifications - Explained

I'm looking for good clear information/documentation about the Feeds and Notifications setup when when you're looking to import information from an external RSS feed into your News module.

I've been reading this page www.sitefinity.com/.../creating-a-feed but the information isn't clear.

When creating the feed, the following options don't seem clear in their purpose:

1. Advanced Options > Change Data Structure. What data structure is this referring to. The online documentation refers to this as being the way fields are recorded in the database. So I assume this means once Sitefinity has imported the external data it will use the configuration you specify here.
2. Content To Include - This is where I'm setting up the external RSS Feed information
   Obviously this refers to the incoming data?
   Mapping Settings - I can see a new field that I created in the Data Structure in point 1, but the mapping fields on the right don't match anything found in the RSS feed XML. How is Sitefinity mapping this? In fact most of the fields offered in the right 'add a mapping' field match the XML feed.
3. Publish as - ?
   Is this outgoing? As in making this information available via your own RSS Feed for other people to subscribe to?
   If it is, can this be skipped if you're only looking to import data from an external feed? 
4. In both of the Mapping Settings windows there is a 'Configure Tranlsators' button next to each field, but clicking on it does nothing. What is this meant for and why does it not work? 
5. My custom field that I created in point 1 doesn't appear in the custom News Template that I'm creating.

If anyone can help with this I'd appreciate it.

Regards,
Jacques

I also require help with this. It is easy to write user control to read the external RSS Feed, however, I am looking for the SiteFinity control that will save me the time. There are a few examples on how to setup a blog, but none for an RSS Feed.

did any one came with a solution to this problem?

regards

Jack

Did anyone get the answers?  I have all the same questions and can not find the answers.

Did anyone get the answers? 

Unfortunately I did not get an answer, so I proposed another CMS to my team and we went ahead.

Hi All,

Sorry for the silence. It turned out that one the other Telerik folks have replied 5 months ago, but his reply was not approved up to this date by mistake. For the benefit of the community, I am pasting his response below (in italics):

I am really sorry for all the members who haven't receive a response on this really popular feature of Sitefinity. 

@Justin - good luck with the CMS project you choose and we owe you one for deploying our response on this thread. For quick response you can reply to sales@sitefinity.com or use our support services.

Below is the reply which got stacked in awaiting approval mode for 5 month. I hope it helps:

The process of creating and using Feeds in Sitefinity can be described in 4 steps:

1. You need to choose a title and description for this feed.
2. You have option to change the data structure of the feed you are creating and in which the incoming data will be pulled. For example if you are aware that the incoming data has additional field or you don't need some of its fields you can add/remove fields. Also you can change the fields properties including its data type etc.
3. Next you need to choose from where to pull the data. It can be your internal Sitefinity module or external RSS/Atom feed. In this step you also need to map the fields of the data structure that you created in step 2 and the type from which you are pulling your data.
4. The final step is to choose what to do with the data. You can publish the data as RSS feed, Twitter feed or to transform this feed to other Sitefinity content type which is a very powerful technique that allows you to actually convert one Sitefinity content type to another. And example of this is that you can pull the content of one of your blogs and choose some fields and publish the data as news items.