By jurriaanroelofs on

I found that the aggregator module is very inflexible.

I would like the option to aggregate articles from feeds and automatically generate a node from the info in the feed. Is ther something that does this already?

⋅ Categories: Drupal 4.7.x

Comments

Max Bell’s picture

Max Bell commented

You might look at aggregator2, since it does just that and largely works, even if it's unfinished -- it's based on a module originally written by Ber Kessels, node aggregator, and has a similarly unfinished rewrite, leech.

At present, I have enough interest in the basic functionality of node aggregator (almost as much as Drupal 5.0) that I might take a crack at doing a rewrite, myself; that I would admit this out loud might possibly be considered a cue for someone (anyone) who knows what they're doing to finish one of them before I injure someone with thumb-sucker PHP...

jurriaanroelofs’s picture

jurriaanroelofs commented

sounds awesome, have you tried this module yourself? to wich extent does it work?

Ideally I would like to have the syndicated nodes to enter drupal in the form of a specified content type.

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Max Bell’s picture

Max Bell commented

I played around with leech finally a bit this afternoon, after posting my reply, in fact, and yes, both aggregator2 and leech work. Neither of them are production quality and both have unworking features and unresolved bugs. Leech is slick, and supports templating kind of like contemplate, but you can tell from reading the thread where the file is posted that the project was orphaned due to lack of interest by the writer (maybe they fell under a bus or something, regardless, it hasn't been updated in some time).

Besides merely publishing feed items to the main page, there are a great many things I would like to see aggregation accomplish and I think most of it is possible except for want of a good proof of concept. In my daydream aggregator, for example, it is possible to filter items published to a specific location based on keywords; feeds are available for syndication that combine screen scraping, email and regular RSS syndication to create feeds that cover ALL the dialogs occurring about, say, support, or theme development, whether they originate from a feedster search, these forums, the support mailing list or groups.drupal.org -- and readers could respond and publish new feed items directly to the same feed without needing to log on to a specific site or even be using Drupal at all. Sadly, an RSS-capable editor of some kind or an email client would be necessary until the XUL/telepathy option was finished, but hey.

Mostly, though, I wanted a news site like the Drudge Report that would take in huge numbers of feeds and sort through them for me using a search, flagging only the ones I was interested in and presenting the option to publish a link to the feed on my main page if I figured it was newsworthy.

Of course, nothing like this is possible at present, to the best of my knowledge. And it hasn't in the five or so years I've been using Drupal. If everything else about the platform wasn't so fascinating and fun to play with, I really might have gotten serious enough about writing such a thing to at least have a working spec by now...