I need a vary basic functionality to display story titles from an external feed as a list.
Each user have their own "profile page" which is a custom content type created with CCK. The content type has a Blog Feed URL field. I would like to parse 10 newest items from the feed and display them on the profile page without saving them into nodes. The perfect way actually would be - having aggregation of the items into nodes optional. This way users could choose if they want their content to be aggregated here, or just shown as links on their profile pages to their own content on their sites.
What would be the way of doing this? There are so many aggregation modules, but it looks like they do much more then I really need right now.
It seams like Feed API should be able to do this. Any suggestions would be helpful.
Thank you!
Comments
Hey, I wouldn't be afraid of
Hey,
I wouldn't be afraid of just creating nodes for the items you would like to show on the user profile. Then I would theme the nodes in a way so that the users go directly from the node title to the original article. This way you avoid people going to the node view page (node/[id]).
You could give users an option to show their latest X nodes or all of them. If they chose "latest X" you show only the latest X items. Dont delete the other ones - they are not going to bother you. You can optionally set a high expiration date for feed items so that you don't wind up with a lot of feed item cruft over the years.
Basically any node supporting aggregator out there could serve these requirements.
If you use feedapi you should be able to turn the profile page content type into a feedapi enabled content type and thus get the URL field for free. If you would like to add only 1 feed per user, this might be a way to go.
Otherwise allow users to add feeds by creating a new feed node and associating them to their profile node (e. g. with nodereference. With a little bit of trickery you can do the referencing "invisible" for the user).
If you can live with hard coded content types, simplefeed or aggregation (only PHP5) are options, too.
http://www.twitter.com/lxbarth
Linking headlines to original articles... What about RSS output?
I've been experimenting with FeedAPI the last few days, and have done just that -- for me, the easiest way was creating a custom node.tpl.php file for that content type, and then replacing:
<h2><a href="<?php print $node_url ?>" title="<?php print $title ?>"><?php print $title ?></a></h2>... with this:
<h2><a href="<?php print $node->links['feedapi_original']['href'] ?>" title="<?php print $title ?>"><?php print $title ?></a></h2>My question, though, is what to do about the RSS feed produced by my site? How can make sure that when a user clicks through on one of these aggregated items from my site's RSS, it takes them directly to the original item, and not to node/[id] on my site.
The RSS is obviously created independently of the teaser; and the Contemplate module's RSS-altering options seem to only cover the "body" of RSS items, not the headline/link. I've found what seem to be the relevant Drupal functions (http://api.drupal.org/api/function/format_rss_item/5 and http://api.drupal.org/api/function/node_feed/5), but am still trying to wrap my head around what's required.
Any suggestions would be much appreciated. (And to answer the obvious question -- yes, I do actually need to create nodes for these aggregated items. We'll be picking and choosing among items, not posting everything that comes in, and will often need to rewrite what goes into that teaser to give proper context and attribution. Otherwise, I'd have happily taken the plain old Aggregator approach.)
Thanks!
TKS
Troy K. Schneider
http://www.newamerica.net
http://www.troyschneider.com
http://twitter.com/TroySchneider
thanks for the code TKS
I didn't think about linking the title to the article until I read your post, it's much cleaner than the Original article link . I am interested if you figured out the way to modify the rss items.
All great suggestions...
I actually went this way - just let users to create new content since there can be multiple blogs or other feed sources. I sure can theme title links the way I want to avoid duplicate content.
Thanks to all for good ideas.
Google maybe?
Sounds like a perfect use for Google's FeedAPI javascript system, plonk its in a block (or node) and you're done.