Right on!

I can vouch for the brilliance of simplefeed. It’s a great step up from the aggregator module in both features and performance. A couple feeds which wouldn’t even parse in aggregator came through just fine for me in simplefeed. If there are other plans great – but Drupal 6 could do much worse than to just replace the current aggregator in core with this. :)

How does Simplefeed differ from Leech and Feedparser? It seems that all three are duplicating many of the same features, just doing it in wildly different ways. I desperately need feed node capability, but all these options are confusing me. :-)

One other question: Can the admin choose the “author” of each feed item in the feed definition?

Well, Simplefeed actually works :) Leech and feedparser are (still) quite unstable, maybe because they try to maintain too many features. Simplefeed works perfectly, does exactly what its supposed to do and nothing more. It was a godsend for me!

Seems like Aaron Novak will have another module to consider when comparing and consolidating feed parsing modules as part of his Google Summer of Code project in a few weeks. http://drupal.org/node/135602

@Gábor: yes, this almost makes Aaron’s project a bit redundant or outdated. It seems like we have a good opportunity to reconsider the scope of his project, something which I will communicate to him and his mentors.

Hi Ted and everybody else in the thread,

Great to see that simplefeed is 1.0 – will check it out asap.

I don’t see Aron’s SoC project getting redundant though – Simplefeed is going to be great input (or the basis?) for finding a good extensible aggregator foundation in Drupal core.

For everybody who’s interested in this discussion: http://groups.drupal.org/node/3528

Alex

PS: Towards more modularity! Aron just broke out yahoo_terms from leech module: it is a standalone module now. It now allows you to use the yahoo terms extraction service for any kind of node – so you can use it also for simplefeed items. http://drupal.org/project/yahoo_terms

Can this be used to make local site feeds? For example, say you are building a site that will have multiple podcasts of its own – can feed/feed_item be used for this or is this only external aggregation?

I like the feed/feed_item metaphor vs. just having multiple feeds in Drupal based on taxonomy or user id.

Well, out of frustration with the aggregator2 I created the aggregation module. Please feel free to test it and tell me what you think. It’s come a long way and is very robust and stable.

http://drupal.org/project/aggregation

Please contact me if you’re interested and let’s collaborate on something exciting!

@zoon_unit – The author of each feed item is inherited from the owner of the feed node. There isn’t a good way to create a feed item owner since it uses Drupal’s user system and hence, you’d be creating accounts for non-existent users. However, we are working on supplying the full feed item object so you could display this at the theme level, that is coming soon.

@dldege – SimpleFeed is only for external aggregation, not for supplying feeds. That is what views + views RSS is for :-)

@mistknight – Most sure! We are open to collaboration and seems your module surfaced around the time ours did. I have not had a chance to look at yours but if you look at SimpleFeed and have ideas, perhaps we can work out a roadmap there.

Thanks for all the other kind feedback too!

I’m using Simplefeed to aggregate content at Blogotariat and I’m pretty pleased with it. I hacked the node template and a few other bits to get the items looking how I wanted them (eg link to Feed itself. So thanks very much for all your efforts.

My two wishes would be for an option to attempt to detect duplicate or updated feed items, and from the Feed view the ability to purge all related feed item nodes.

Great ideas, please submit those to the issue queue: http://drupal.org/project/simplefeed