Feed Gator, RSS news feed aggregator component alpha released

[stephenrs]

Feed Gator imports RSS feed content as regular content items, and I'm looking for testers and feature requests...and also feedback on my new site is very welcome (so far tested on Firefox and Flock and mostly working on IE6).

Download the component here: http://phlooid.com

Enjoy.

[squig]

Tried to download it got this:

"The page you are trying to access does not exist.
Please select a page from the main menu"

Tried multiple times

[stephenrs]

Hmmm, I'm not seeing this error, and others seem able to download the file OK. Maybe try clearing your cache and try again. Also, can you send me the link that is generating the error?

Thanks.

[eyezberg]

confirmed, even if logged in.
your module (ajax) works nicely

not working link is
http://phlooid.com/component/option,com ... emository/

order looks a bit weird.. com_ nothing, and remo at the end..?

PS: link in the "goodies" page; "download now", here: http://phlooid.com/blogsection/joomla_goodies/

PPS: this works fine: http://phlooid.com/joomla_downloads/Dow ... omponents/

[stephenrs]

Thanks for the additional info - the links have been fixed, and now the "Download now" links will take you to the main downloads page, same as clicking the top menu downloads link (not deep linked to the actual file), I hope this isn't too confusing.

Thanks again.


Also eyezberg: thanks for the kind words on the login module - I guess I'll announce it on a separate thread.

[brian]

Awesome component this is going on my essentials watchlist.

Not sure if it is working 100% as some of the menu items in the bacck end result in nothing.

A feature request wold be to be able to run the import at regular times

Brian

[stephenrs]

Awesome, thanks.

Yes, some of the menu items are place holders for future functionality, like global settings and such.

Also - at the top of my features todo list is a cron package to include with the distribution. I'm just working out the best way to implement it - suggestions are welcome. This feature should be in the next revision.

[brian]

The feeds seem to be going into the main content and not the intro. imho it needs to be intro

[stephenrs]

the feeds actually go into both the intro and the main content area, which i think provides the most flexibility at this stage.

for feeds that provide long descriptions, the intro can be trimmed as needed on a feed-by-feed basis.

let me know if you are experiencing something different, and please provide the url that you're importing.

future versions will have more configurability with regard to how feed content will be stored, such as publish up/down, archiving, meta keyword tagging, etc.

i wanted to get a sense from others before i went too far in any particular direction.

[brian]

These are the feeds I am using and the text is only going into main ;(

Distrowatch http://distrowatch.com/news/dw.xml
The Register http://www.theregister.co.uk/excerpts.rss
OS News http://www.osnews.com/files/recent.xml

Brian

[brian]

Two more comments

1. I havent checked but does the component check to ensure the item is not already there when you do an import

2. Also I think it would be good (at least from an accreditation perspective instead of there being a hover over the "read more" that it actualy said "read more at http://www.originalsitehere.com"

[stephenrs]

I tried http://www.osnews.com/files/recent.xml, and it worked as expected.

I think I might know the problem you're having. What value are you entering for Trim Intro? If you are leaving this blank, then you have found a bug (thanks), and the workaround for now is to set it to a very high number (like 100000). This will be fixed in the next release.

[stephenrs]

Two more comments

1. I havent checked but does the component check to ensure the item is not already there when you do an import

2. Also I think it would be good (at least from an accreditation perspective instead of there being a hover over the "read more" that it actualy said "read more at http://www.originalsitehere.com"

1. Yes the component will not import duplicates if the content item is already published on your site, so it is safe to run it as often as you like without cluttering your content. It uses the title for duplicate comparison, and for testing purposes, if a content item is in your trash it may be imported again.

2. You are absolutely right, and this is on my feature todo list, along with the option to not show the link at all (although this would be bad form for web publishers, but I think folks should have the option).

One of the things I need to work out is which things should be system-wide and which should be on a per-feed basis.

Thanks.

[brian]

I tried http://www.osnews.com/files/recent.xml, and it worked as expected.

I think I might know the problem you're having. What value are you entering for Trim Intro? If you are leaving this blank, then you have found a bug (thanks), and the workaround for now is to set it to a very high number (like 100000). This will be fixed in the next release.

Yes that was it

Brian

[brian]

Two more comments

1. I havent checked but does the component check to ensure the item is not already there when you do an import

2. Also I think it would be good (at least from an accreditation perspective instead of there being a hover over the "read more" that it actualy said "read more at http://www.originalsitehere.com"

1. Yes the component will not import duplicates if the content item is already published on your site, so it is safe to run it as often as you like without cluttering your content. It uses the title for duplicate comparison, and for testing purposes, if a content item is in your trash it may be imported again.

Great

2. You are absolutely right, and this is on my feature todo list, along with the option to not show the link at all (although this would be bad form for web publishers, but I think folks should have the option).

Glad you have this in hand. It might also be worth mentioning somehwere that you should check to se if the feed site permits the use of their feed in tis way. I know of some that say for personal use only.

[squig]

Awesom stephenrs, thanks very much for this component the link worked for me now and for the
first time I got some rss feeds working on my test site, I couldn't ever get the joomla feed component
working for some reason and was waiting for someone to make something for rss.

Excellent, you are the best!!!

[stephenrs]

Great! I'm glad it's working out for you.

Be sure to let me know if you have any feature requests. For now, you can post requests to this thread.

Enjoy.

[domregchief]

Feed Gator imports RSS feed content as regular content items, and I'm looking for testers and feature requests...and also feedback on my new site is very welcome (so far tested on Firefox and Flock and mostly working on IE6).

Enjoy.

Hi, I am used to this feature on Drupal .. have been looking for something like this for joomla. I am downloading your component today and will join the testing cycle,

Aggregator2 component is very feature rich and allows you to create blocks etc., in drupal and include the content within the site.  if you want to know about the features aggregator2 provides, here is a link .. http://drupal.org/node/32384

[stephenrs]

Thanks for the tip on Agrregator2, and welcome to the testing group. I haven't had a chance to check out Aggregator module beyond reading the description, but I have a fresh Drupal install that I've been playing with so maybe I'll give it a closer look.

Be sure to let me know if you have any specific feature requests, and stay tuned for a Feed Gator update which will be coming very soon...

[domregchief]

Feed Gator works great for me..  it first complained about missing rss.php and when I copied the pear libs into its root directory, it works.

One thing i noticed is that I dont see anything under settings.. Is it really an empty page ?

One idea based on very light testing until now is..
1. Adding an Original Author Field so that a name can be displayed in the content.

[stephenrs]

The PEAR lib (rss.php) can be installed in your normal PEAR location as long as your include_path is set correctly. Also, that library is optional (Feed Gator will work without it), and the warning is fixed in the next version.

One thing i noticed is that I dont see anything under settings.. Is it really an empty page ?

The current version has empty placeholders for some of the menus - currently the only settings are for individual feeds. This will change with the next version (coming very soon).

One idea based on very light testing until now is..
1. Adding an Original Author Field so that a name can be displayed in the content.

There will be an option for this in the next version.


Enjoy

[squig]

UPDATE:

Ok after using it for a few days I noticed something, when I put everything to go into the news section say, then I click
the news section link from the homepage, it doesn't show all the feeds on the same page, but gives the page numbers at the bottom because I have like 100 items now just from the feeds.

When I click any of the page numbers at the bottom of the first page, I get a "you are not authorized to view this resource" and "you need to login" errors if I am not logged in. But I get the "not authorized" whether logged in or not to the front end as admin.

So I can only access the news links I put on the first page, it doesn't separate them properly into multiple pages. So
in other words I can't even view all the items that are in the feeds because only the first page of the items will
be possible for me to even see on any page.

Also I can setup feeds ok in the backend, but on the backend component page I get this error

Warning: main(XML/RSS.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/****/public_html/*******/administrator/components/com_feedgator/admin.feedgator.php on line 14

Warning: main(): Failed opening 'XML/RSS.php' for inclusion (include_path='.:/usr/lib/php:/usr/local/lib/php') in /home/****/public_html/*******/administrator/components/com_feedgator/admin.feedgator.php on line 14


***** = my private login names


Thanks and I hope you understand what I am trying to explain here

Best wishes

[stephenrs]

Ok after using it for a few days I noticed something, when I put everything to go into the news section say, then I click
the news section link from the homepage, it doesn't show all the feeds on the same page, but gives the page numbers at the bottom because I have like 100 items now just from the feeds.

This problem is not caused by Feed Gator - this is most likely due to some other component interaction on your site. Feed Gator simply saves content items into the content table - how they are displayed and navigated on the site is up to you (and the other components you are using). Feed Gator does not control pagination - except in the sense that it stores creation dates with content items for ordering purposes.

I have seen this problem on my site as well, but it is being caused by the OpenSEF component and has been discussed in the OpenSEF forums. When OpenSEF is disabled, pagination works just fine.

Are you using OpenSEF or any other advanced SEF tool? Also check to make sure your "ordering" settings in the backend correspond to your wishes. Also, can you please confirm that the publishing and creation dates are being set properly on your content items?

Also I can setup feeds ok in the backend, but on the backend component page I get this error

Warning: main(XML/RSS.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/****/public_html/*******/administrator/components/com_feedgator/admin.feedgator.php on line 14

Warning: main(): Failed opening 'XML/RSS.php' for inclusion (include_path='.:/usr/lib/php:/usr/local/lib/php') in /home/****/public_html/*******/administrator/components/com_feedgator/admin.feedgator.php on line 14

This is a known issue (see posts #19 and #20 above), and is fixed in the next version, which I am in the final phases of testing.

Thanks.

[stephenrs]

New version released: http://forum.joomla.org/index.php/topic,41834.0.html

Please use that thread for any questions or problems with Feed Gator.

Thanks.

[d3vlabs]

Thanks for 0.2

I understand that I cannot simply make a new menu for the FeedGator component but I rather have to make a menu item for the Content Category where the feeds are being published. Is this something that's planned in next version or this was your idea behind it, since Joomla only gives you 2 options by default which are table or blog display for content. Will need some hacking to make the feeds looks right, for example "River of News" style in Joomla. I also want to take this time to applud you on your work at phlooid.com (maybe you wish to release some core files that you modified later to get that different content output ). We at #joomla (freenode) spent sometime discussing your project (phlooid.com) and pretty much everyone had something positive to say about it. (thats a compliment  )

[stephenrs]

If I'm understanding you correctly, the closest you can get right now to a "river of news" is to use the standard latest news module for the categories/sections that you're importing your feeds into. You can also use a Joomla blog section or blog category with truncated content item intros to emulate a RON.

i'm working on modules that will work with Feed Gator specifically, maybe a RON will be one of them.

(maybe you wish to release some core files that you modified later to get that different content output Huh).

This is a possibility.

We at #joomla (freenode) spent sometime discussing your project (phlooid.com) and pretty much everyone had something positive to say about it. (thats a compliment  Cheesy)

I would love to have been a "fly on the wall" for that discussion. If any specific suggestions came out of it, I'm very much open to hearing them.

Thanks for the encouraging words.

[commjo]

What a fantastic component.

I have been thinking about automating the importing of newsfeeds. If it is a php script that is run when you import via joomla administration, how about setting a cron job to run that script?

If so, can you give me the name of the php script which needs to be run, and I can get my webhoster to run that php script each day.

Alternatively, google sitemap generator has the ability to run cron jobs and create a sitemap via a module I think. Maybe there is some code there that can be used.

http://www.joomlaresource.com/Joomla_Ad ... Generator/

Anyway, what a great component ....

[chris_t]

i'm getting an error i haven't seen mention of previously. when i try to import anything:

Cannot fetch feed!!: OS News *** Please click here to send an alert to Phlooid support. *** Thank you

this happens with several feeds, all of which are reliable (BBC, theregister etc). can anyone suggest what might be the problem?

[stephenrs]

i'm getting an error i haven't seen mention of previously. when i try to import anything:

Cannot fetch feed!!: OS News *** Please click here to send an alert to Phlooid support. *** Thank you

this happens with several feeds, all of which are reliable (BBC, theregister etc). can anyone suggest what might be the problem?

The first thing that I would suggest is that you click the link - it will send me an email containing the feed URL so that I can check it out. I investigate all of these alerts, and reply with further information depending on what I find.

It may be the case that Feed Gator is having difficulty with your feeds because of a bug that was introduced with the last release. The problem has been corrected in the current development version of Feed Gator, and I've also improved handling of difficult or invalid feeds overall. Surprisingly, many feeds, even from reliable sources, are not valid RSS, but the improvements to FG help to mitigate this situation. The feed alert reports that I receive are helpful for finding ways to improve the import process, so without more information I can't say exactly what your particular problem might be.

As a point of general information: I've been extremely busy with client work and keeping up with support of the components I've released, but a new release of Feed Gator should be ready in the next few days...

[chris_t]

The first thing that I would suggest is that you click the link - it will send me an email containing the feed URL so that I can check it out. I investigate all of these alerts, and reply with further information depending on what I find.

It may be the case that Feed Gator is having difficulty with your feeds because of a bug that was introduced with the last release. The problem has been corrected in the current development version of Feed Gator, and I've also improved handling of difficult or invalid feeds overall. Surprisingly, many feeds, even from reliable sources, are not valid RSS, but the improvements to FG help to mitigate this situation. The feed alert reports that I receive are helpful for finding ways to improve the import process, so without more information I can't say exactly what your particular problem might be.

As a point of general information: I've been extremely busy with client work and keeping up with support of the components I've released, but a new release of Feed Gator should be ready in the next few days...

thanks for the reply. i'll submit those which cannot be imported now. however, i managed to get one to import:

http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashd ... ghtsOnline

i thought it was because this was rdf and the rest are rss. however, i tried this one and got the original error message:

http://www.wired.com/news_drop/netcenter/netcenter.rdf

i'll send that through to you too.