Implement Aggregator Item Length module on Drupal.org

I've complained about this before and the answer I've always gotten is that people using RSS want the whole post. :(

Michelle

FWIW, I'd much rather have the entire post on the planet as well. Less clicking, more reading.

@Bojhan --

This is really a small to non-existent issue -- If you're getting the feed in a feedreader, you're likely just looking at the titles anyway.

RE: "It might harder concept to grasp that most people don't read the full d.o.p"

Actually, it's a pretty easy concept to grasp.

RE: "a lot of those are expert users who have less benefit from full length articles that don't concern there working area."

And some of them aren't. The link you include is to an article from October, 1997 -- the web has changed a bit since then, but the advice in that page is a combination of writing advice that holds true across mediums (ie, be concise, one idea per paragraph, invert the lead, etc) and some basic formatting instructions that hold equally well for full text or titles -- much of the advice in that page is just good technical writing advice that was true before the web ever existed.

In the overall scheme of things, this feels like a minor issue, and one that can easily get addressed via the redesign of d.o, and that will almost certainly be addressed with the new core aggregator work for D7.

Changing status to minor; possibly the status should be marked as postponed, but that's more for someone actively involved in the d.o redesign to say.

It should be possible for the RSS to be diffrent in its format then D.O planet I would assume

Planet aggragates the RSS feeds. If people put the break tag in their posts, the RSS gets a teaser as well as Planet. So it's up to the individual poster to do it. Some do, some don't. Possibly something could be done if they use a different aggregator in the redesign but core's is pretty limited.

Michelle

@bojhan - provide a patch and it will get applied. Otherwise this is idle speculation that is better directed towards the redesign than the webmasters queue.

I think that this should be solvable, and I'm tagging it as a Google Code-In project to see if someone can handle it. If not, I'll assign it to a tech @ Zivtech, as we worked a lot on this page for the redesign, but we have less than zero time to work on it over the next 2 months, so...

Anyway, my suggestion for this is to expose a form to users on that page that says "view trimmed posts" (or perhaps a dropdown that gives the choices of "full posts", "trimmed posts", and "titles only". Then, I suggest we use JavaScript to change the viewer options, and keep the RSS feed as is (since you can control your viewing preferences from your feed reader if you like).

I'd say we should default to the trimmed version, since I agree that would be the best view for a first-time user.

We're not throwing new open source contributors into a community mine field. Removing GCI tags.

If you can come to consensus about what to implement, we can revisit. But please follow instructions for proposing GCI tasks.

This would be one of the things solved with not using core aggregator module. We're stuck with full posts since that's what we want to re-aggregate to RSS. I'm filing an issue to look at overall techincal solutions to improving the Planet, which may be better to spend time on in the long run rather than an one-off solution.

Curious: is there a policy against jQuery plugins? If not, we could possibly use something like the jQuery truncate plugin to solve the task w/out having to wait until we can get a non-aggregator solution implemented (which I suspect may not happen for a long time).

Not that I know of. It would be something that would have to be run by the infrastructure team on what can and cannot be deployed. Webmaster's do not handle that kind of thing.

Thanks, I created #958464: Possible to use jQuery plugin (truncate) on d.o.? to see if it's possible.

Great, if we can get an easy solution in the meantime, that would be awesome, and its not my intent to deter efforts on it.

Looks as though #958464: Possible to use jQuery plugin (truncate) on d.o.? was given the go ahead!

Yup- I have a 'todo' task in my GTD list to add a Google Code-In task to review and recommend one of the truncate plugins, but haven't found the time yet. Maybe tomorrow, although please feel free to do so (or test them), if you have some time.

#1035184-73: Form a community consensus on Planet Drupal guidelines contains a 3 line snippet for drupalorg.module that fixes this issue.

+1 and subscribing.

I did a quick poll to ask how people they prefer the posts (full/trimmed) and how they read the planet (reader/on site).

Results say that roughly 2/3 prefer teasers, and 2/3 use some kind of RSS reader.
The groups are pretty evenly distributed between all combinations, except the combination "I want full posts and I read on drupal.org/planet" which was small. There has so far been almost 70 comments/votes.

A handfull of people suggested two separate feeds to make everyone happy. Greggles posted a link to this issue + provided the excellent idea of having a JavaScript that may truncate the posts when displaying them on d.o/planet.

I know the selection is probably biased, but it is still better than mere guesses.
The post, and the comments, can be found here: http://nodeone.se/blogg/drupal-planet-stream-teasers-or-full-posts

Just going to provide a use-case here: I use an mobile RSS reader that downloads the full rss feed. I can read this on the subway and other places where there's no reception. It's a pretty big annoyance when only teasers are available, as I can't read the rest of the article until I get back from offline. Also, the RSS reader experience is very quick and fluid, since everything is loaded, but it can really slow down when my old phone needs to open up chrome mobile and download pages on a network that is sometimes congested.

Anyhow, use-case FTW!

tl;dr I prefer full cached post body in my rss reader, and just collapse to titles in order to skim :)

I have solved this with a module ready to use once Drupal.org is ported to D7. https://drupal.org/project/aggregator_item_length

We can set it to display teaser length on the website, but to still provide full posts in the re-aggregated RSS feed.

Updated title.

@Dave Reid - The D7 upgrade has happened. Would be nice to have this issue fixed. Kinda crazy it was started in 2008.

I have provided a way for it to easily be fixed in D7. All it needs is someone to add and enable the module on Drupal.org, which I'm not active in the workflow for doing. I guess that helping to get us there halfway is reason for me to be chastised.

+1 for Dave Reid's solution.

@Dave Reid - Sorry... Definitely didn't mean to chastise you for this. It was a good suggestion from not that long ago. It totally makes sense to me to try enabling the module, and I think Drupal.corg customizations is the project that can take this on.

I'm frustrated that good ideas like this can sit in an issue queue for over 5 years... That is definitely not your responsibility...

If we're going to go the route of using that module, the next step is not to "bump" the issue or note it's age, but instead to review the suitability of https://drupal.org/project/aggregator_item_length for use on drupal.org There's a guide for how to review code changes to d.o. Also, this wouldn't become an issue for drupalorg module changes but it should be in infrastructure queue for deployment (but only after review and some sense of consensus that this is the right solution).

Thanks for the clarification @greggles

From reading this thread,
+1 too for Dave Reid's solution.

Full Posts on the website seem not reasonable, and are very annoying in my personal opinion.

I'm changing title of this issue and moving this to Drupal.org customizations so Drumm can provide some guidance on how best to implement this.

The only thing I'd add to #28 is that we should decide on specific length.

I have this issue on my list of Planet things to think about and I'll bring this up in our next meeting pending drumm's verdict if this is technically feasible.

It would be great to get this resolved and make the Planet more readable again.

What is the question to the Community Working Group?

This issue had a lot of debate where people who use an rss reader said they want full feed and people who look at the page in a browser wanted shorter summaries. Ever since Dave created the module that allows exactly that structure, nobody has disagreed with the proposal: full feed in rss and trimmed feeds on d.o/planet.

I think the only open question on this issue is the length to trim, which is easily changed after the module has been reviewed/deployed. It's probably hard to say how long of a trim people want without some examples so lets just review the module and get it live and tweak the trim length after the fact.

Given all that, it can move straight to implementation.

Meta note: The Working Groups are a great tool that we should leverage when we need to. But if we don't absolutely need to refer a question to them then skipping that process is faster and will help keep them from getting bogged down.

Just to be clear, if we can get it sooner than later I am all for it. (I.e. another +1)

pending drumm's verdict if this is technically feasible.

I don't have any special review to do. #28 has the instructions for anyone to review. I will of course do a second pass, but no need to wait for me to do a first pass. As always, http://drupal.org/node/1018084 can be used to test this in the context of Drupal.org, but that isn't really needed for a generic module; it could help decide the specific item length.

In general, if a new module fulfills the goals well, is well-maintained, doesn't break things, and free of security & scalability problems, we can and should use it.

Any chance of getting Dave's module deployed? It would be awesome to get this issue fixed before its ninth year anniversary :-)

I think drumm's advice to get this in he gave in #38 still is valid.
I would love to see sth like this implemented but I have zero bandwith to work on it.

The aggregator_item_length module has been deployed & enabled on Drupal.org. It also has a call to correct unclosed HTML tags, which is nicer than other ways of handling bad feed content. I picked a length of 2000 for now.

*repeated air horn sound*

Awesome!

Coincidentially, today the planet shows a bunch of interesting edge-cases which trigger some bugs of the length-shortening:

An ultimately short excerpt

maybe a READ ORIGINAL link would make sense.
Or cut out the post if trimmed length is zero?

A short post

, so the read more is kind of rightfully missing.
maybe a READ ORIGINAL link would still make sense.
Also, the middle post has only MORE vs. READ MORE ... why?

A post with short intro-text

, the original post is longer, so the
READ MORE is missing,
short intro is not distinguishable from a short post.

The rest

is kind of a different debate:

Cut out empty paragraphs?
Cut out images?
Cut all html?

I would recommend the latter, and define the mission of the planet as
"being there for an overview on what's being posted, aggregated news. It's intended the user goes to the original url for reading".
Having a shortened feed points that way anyways.

At least as long as not all (most) html is cut out, it would make sense to
better separate each post from the next.
Maybe visually separate title/meta/body with a background surrounding each feed-item:

, so the read more is kind of rightfully missing.
maybe a READ ORIGINAL link would still make sense.
Also, the middle post has only MORE vs. READ MORE ... why?

FYI the post that has just the "more" link has a short post and the "more" link contained in the feed for that site, we are just displaying it as-is. Since it was already short and didn't need trimming, it didn't get the "read more" link. Only if the post is trimmed for display is the "Read more" link added.

, the original post is longer, so the
READ MORE is missing,
short intro is not distinguishable from a short post.

Again, we can only display what's the the feed from the site, we aren't reading the data from the original posts, it's up to the site to put their full post in their feed content. You can click on the title to view the original post on their site.

Maybe visually separate title/meta/body with a background surrounding each feed-item

A way to visually distinguish between the posts would be a good idea and worth a new issue to file about that.