By asauterChicago on

This would seem relatively easy, but I'm not sure how to do this. I'm new to Drupal and the whole thing is very confusing. I have a feed of best sellers from our e-commerce store I want to feed in on the right hand column of our Drupal site. However, I can't seem to figure out away to customize the blocks to embed an RSS feed. I figure if worse comes to worse, I can open up the template and force a layer, but this seems like it might be problematic in the long run.

Edited by: VM; changed version

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

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VM’s picture

VM commented

you've tagged this drupal 7.x?

I'd say use the feedapi.module to pull the feeds turn them into nodes, and use the views.module to create blocks, but those modules aren't likely D7 ready yet.

asauterChicago’s picture

asauterChicago commented

Sorry Drupal 6.x, not 7.

asauterChicago’s picture

asauterChicago commented

Anyway, so I figured out how to do this without doing something drastic that would crash the site.

Essentially, if anyone is interested I downloaded the FeedAPI module and the Views module. You then go and set up and import a new feed with the FeedAPI module, which will create a new node for you. There's actually pretty decent documentation on the FeedAPI module so I won't go through this step-by-by step. Then you use the Views module to create a block that you can put somewhere on your site. The Views module is still kind of voodoo to me at this point (new view->Aggregator item->BAM! your feed is magically there... 0_o), but again there are tutorials and videos on the web to get a block with an embedded RSS feed up.

Now I have one question which I can't seem to find online. How do I include the images in the feed? The Views module will allow me to pull the item, content, title, publishing date etc. but there's no option to show the items picture. All items pulled from the RSS feed are already thumbnails and the pictures show up fine under the Adminster->Feed aggregator->view feed area, but it doesn't display in the newly created block.

sonia-w’s picture

sonia-w commented

Can you point me to the documentation? I must be looking in the wrong place. I read the readme.txt in the FeedAPI module and did not find detailed instructions.

I think I'm all burned out on learning drupal for now, so a 'for-dummies' style set of instructions would really hit the spot.

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Okay, I think I found that I don't need FeedAPI. All I need is in the Aggregator core module which I did not have turned on. And there is documentation on Aggregator:

http://drupal.org/handbook/modules/aggregator