ted serbinski – entrepreneur & web architect

SimpleFeed 1.0 ships!

That’s right, SimpleFeed, the fastest and easiest to use feed parser for Drupal is finally stable and release worthy!

A few months back (well half a year, but who’s counting, it’s been a busy summer / fall ;-)), I mentioned a release would be soon but didn’t realize it would take so long.

Anyways, here is the run down of the changes since then…

Complete rewrite of caching layer, now uses file caching and built in SimplePie methods to cache feeds. This has resulted in significant performance increases with a huge drop in memory consumption, an issue that plagued earlier versions of this module.
Better parsing of feeds, working around common issues and annoyances, along with additional performance tweaks
The end of SimpleFeed as an API. It does one thing and does it well: parse feeds. If you want to manipulate them, use hook_nodeapi. If that doesn’t do what you want (in most cases it should), then check out FeedAPI. This change not only simplified things but resulted in further performance increases. I have successfully used hook_nodeapi to manipulate feeds in a number of projects so this route really is the easiest and fastest one, IMO.
Better uninstall routines, along with preserving content so it can be migrated to FeedAPI.
Easily empty all items in a feed, for easy testing.
Automatically generate titles when they don’t exist in the feed.
Added token support.
New refresh modes: never & manual. Now you can use hook_nodeapi and hook_cron to write your own routines.
Tons of other bug fixes

Indeed this module has matured quite a bit and I’m please to offer it as a 1.0 release now. Tested and working quite well, with one known instance processing over 300+ feeds every 15 min with no problems.

Enjoy!

posted 16 Nov 2007

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13 comments

Jim Smith wrote 2 years 41 weeks ago

This is awesome news. Thanks, m3avrck.

Are there any particular tweaks, tricks or server optimization changes done to help manage the 300+ feeds at momblognetwork.com?

FiReaNG3L wrote 2 years 41 weeks ago

Awesome Ted, this module allowed me to build a google news like aggregator for science (which im gonna release soon! only the design part is left – ugh).

Can’t be thankful enough, it saved me from the mess that was aggregator.module and leech.module :)

Can’t wait to see your next projects

Drupal Theme Garden wrote 2 years 41 weeks ago

Very nice work, Congrats.

And very big progress since then … (earlier versions)

ted wrote 2 years 41 weeks ago

@Jim — actually, nothing really special to handle that many feeds (at least right now). We do have the hardware to do this and we have separated out Drupal cron runs into stand alone scripts, but other than that, the base module is handling almost everything very well :-)

@FiReaNG3L – thanks! Glad this project is saving people headaches :-)

@DrupalThemeGarden – thanks!

Horacio Salazar wrote 2 years 40 weeks ago

Ted:

Nice and easy.

Now, of course, comes the wish.

What about an option to configure the nodes per block instead of having it hard-coded?

Cheers

ted wrote 2 years 40 weeks ago

Well a default view is provided that suggests a simple block and page. If you don’t like this or want more, simply override the view, or how I have been using it, just write your own custom block to do whatever you want :-)

alex_b wrote 2 years 40 weeks ago

Hey Ted,

I just checked it out and test drove it. Nice work. I love the compactness of the module and its clean code. I updated the module comparison chart here: http://groups.drupal.org/node/4547 – I am not sure wether I forgot something…

Hope to see you one of these days in DC,

Cheers, Alex

ted wrote 2 years 40 weeks ago

Thanks I’ll have a look and update the chart accordingly. Yes we need some holiday beers soon :-)

LisaG wrote 2 years 32 weeks ago

Hi. I’m having difficulty finding where to enter the URLs for feeds. I must be missing something simple… do you have any documentation?

Thanks Lisa G.

#10

ted wrote 2 years 32 weeks ago

Hey Lisa, everything is a node, so just create a new feed node under “create content” and you’ll be good to go.

#11

LisaG wrote 2 years 32 weeks ago

Thank you, Ted! I was looking under Administer… never would have found it there!

Thanks again! Lisa G.

#12

LisaG wrote 2 years 32 weeks ago

One more question. Is there a way to skip viewing the node, and instead, go right from the teaser to the external site when the visitor clicks on the title? I’ve tried setting this up in Views, but it’s not working for me. I was able to use the SimpleFeed Feed Item: Article title field to get a link to the original site, but the teaser didn’t show when I used the Node:Body field.

Any thoughts?

Thanks, Lisa G.

#13

ted wrote 2 years 32 weeks ago

Hmm, yes there are a few ways to accomplish that. Try filing an issue in the Simplefeed queue to get some more help with that.

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