aggregator

 

 
Problems:

• Drupal's core aggregator does not satisfy the requirements of state
  of the art aggregation applications. E. g. core aggregator lacks
  pluggable configurations or the possibility of creating nodes from
  feed items.
• There is an explosion of contrib modules that try to cover the
  deficiencies of Drupal's aggregator in one or the other way. Previous
  attempts to unify aggregation functionality had limited success.

Moved to official ideas list: http://drupal.org/node/237907

I want to propose a project for building a module that pulls news content from a global news service called Daylife (http://daylife.com)

Daylife is a global news aggregation service that offers an Open API platform called DayPI (http://developer.daylife.com) for any developer, blogger, news service to pull stories and photos about any topic in the world. The API returns data in XML, JSON and PHP serialized formats. You can read the Daylife About page at http://www.daylife.com/page/about to learn more about the company. All platform documentation is on http://developer.daylife.com/docs

I am happy to announce that after a week of cleaning up and improving the API and adding some critical features, yesterday FeedAPI 1.0 beta 1 version came out. These are the features:

This is a concept that hit me last night.

One of the issues we have with current Aggregator is that after a certain number of feeds, it starts to have problems finishing its cron cycle.

Part of this is caused by the fact that Aggregator does three actions during cron:

• Get feed
• Validate feed
• Parse feed

Really, aren't only the first two necessary during the cron run? Couldn't we save some cycles and boost performance by delaying the parsing stage until the data was requested by a user-initiated function (like an Aggregator block load)?

In working on the MySite project, I just wrote the following piece of code. It transfers aggregator feed images and writes them to a local directory.

My thought is this has security and performance benefits. But I may have missed something....

Feedback?

<?php
/**
* This function takes a Feed image and saves it locally.
* We do this for added security and speed.
* @param $fid == the feed id, taken from {aggregator_feed}
* @param $image == the image string taken from {aggregator_feed}
* @return $newfile == the filepath string pointing to the local copy of the file
*/

Hi there.
In a local organizational newspaper I have been helping with over the years, I did an extensive investigation into NewsML as a way of standardizing archiving and editing content format for hard copy production, as a way of guaranteeing that the archive would never be isolated and impossible to translate (via xslt or other means) into a newly adopted format.
NewsML (see http://www.newsml.org ) is being used by Reuters, AFP, and in tens of the world's top newspaper organization publishers (see http://www.newsml.org/pages/whouse_main.php ).

Recently I've really got excited about Microformats and how they can be used to create content that can be aggregated around the internet.

Drupal really needs to support microformats, and I am currently planning and working on a module set that allows this. But I would like your input!

If you read the description of microformats, you can see they are set pieces of information based on existing formats such as vCard and iCal, but written in semantic XHTML, which can then be styled using CSS class selectors. You then have the choice to render them to the page, for example with an event. Or you can embed them in your site, such as linking to someone you have cited on your blog by using the rel tag i.e. XFN.

For newcomers to the RSS topic I dug out an old thread from the Drupal mailing list which discusses the use of MagpieRSS library in Drupal. Interesting read - it was before my time.

http://lists.drupal.org/archives/development/2004-07/msg00400.html