DrupalCon Hungary and FeedAPI
Right on the heels of the international Drupal conference, the key people in theHungarian Drupal community got together for a local conference in Budapest. I got to the conference last weekend just in time for a great presentation by Kristof VanTomme about building websites for small business with Drupal. For me the most exciting part of his discussion was Kristof's commitment to holding the next DrupalCon in Hungary. This would be an excellent opportunity for the Hungarian Drupal and web developers community, and hopefully it would get even more Hungarians into Drupal. It definitely has my vote.
After lunch I gave a presentation on the FeedAPI work I’ve been doing. I have to say I was happy to see that many people are interested in aggregation – it made it a lot of fun to show off how FeedAPI works and how it can be used. I got some really valuable feedback from the community and learned about how people are using it now. For example, I learned that the feed element mapper is a killer feature to use with FeedAPI, and I’m very excited to implement that myself : ) People also shared with me some possible use cases, and one of the most interesting ones to me was as a newsletter archive. In this case, the system admin at a library wants to create a newsletter archive using FeedAPI to collect the information and element mapper to keep data like the issue number. This could be a great way to use FeedAPI.
I also really enjoyed the presentation by the owners of www.alleycat.hu - Lipilee and Ninja – about how to make a Drupal site run extra fast. They showed a couple of smart tricks and common techniques to do this, and they are well worth checking out. You can find slides showing these tricks (in Hungarian) here.
This was my first time attending the Hungarian Drupal conference and all in all I was impressed. It was very well organized and it was really great to see how much people are interested in Drupal in Hungary. Palocz Pal has some great photos of the event here.
5 Comments
Thank you for question
Dear first poster (starting with "why are you not continuing..."):
Very good question.
SimpleFeed is a very good module and it gets very close to what would be an ideal aggregation solution in Drupal. Aron evaluated it in his work for FeedAPI thoroughly (http://groups.drupal.org/node/4547).
Yet, there are some shortcomings that FeedAPI seeks to address: more detailed API with swappable parsers, better cron handling, non-XML feed handling, etc.
The goal is, that SimpleFeed development should ultimately flow into FeedAPI development so that we can stop duplicating efforts.
Also, SimpleFeed and Feed API are very similar, which means that it will be straightforward to provide an upgrade path and that it will be easy for users to plan plan their requirements.
Alex
why are you not continuing
why are you not continuing the work of simplefeed instead of re-implementing everything they have done over again?
re-inventing the wheel
Your question is absolutely reasonable (this was considered during the summer). THe whole purpose of the FeedAPI project is to provide a common base for the aggregation-like solutions. FeedAPI is a young project, I hope that the the goal will be reached. FeedAPI is designed as flexible as possible. This is the (maybe) unique value that we'd like to offer for those who like to do aggregation-like stuff.
SimpleFeed is an excellent module too. We arranged a lot with SimpleFeed developers, the common viewpoint is that if someone needs a very simple and fast module: there is SimpleFeed. For complex things: there is FeedAPI. Let's see the project page of SimpleFeed. Can you tell me what aggregation module do you use?
feed API
the feed API is not some secret project. Representatives of our whole comunity decided to accept and Aron's Feedd API proposal for the Google SOC 2007. Feed APi acknowledges and borrows from many prior efforts like SimpleFed but it goes beyondd them. This code base is clean and capable. have you studied both projects? If you did, I don't think you ould be asking such a question.
Well, first, I meant no
Well, first, I meant no disrespect to your project at all. I have been using simplefeed and despite the name, it has been rewritten to handle multiple parsers. You do not need to use the simplefeed item parser if you want to do anything more complex.
I'll take a look further at your code and see what it can do that simplefeed cannot. I just saw this post and was wondering what the differences are, and why not merge the two projects. There are already so many projects doing aggregation already that are not quite what is needed, why another one instead of merging with existing projects.
As far as the community accepting the project, it happened to get accepted at a time when people didn't know (and likely still don't know) about the changes that were going into simplefeed. Anyway, keep up the good work.