Development Seed Blog

Major Progress for the FeedAPI Module

Aron Novak has spent the past few weeks hard at work developing a new and improved aggregator module for Drupal as part of Google’s Summer of Code. The FeedAPI module takes on the common tasks of the most popular existing aggregator modules and has an API to extend it or tweak it to your needs. The hope is for this module to become the foundation for all future aggregator modules in Drupal, and allow other modules to just plug in to it to add new functionalities.

This module is in a hot phase of development right now, and all input is highly appreciated. So please check it out and give Aron your input.

While the FeedAPI module takes care of all the common tasks in aggregation, such as managing feed pages and scheduling refreshes and feed item expirations, it leaves all doors open to extend it. So it is up to add on modules to determine many of the details like what entity to create from a feed item, what parser is used, how a feed is downloaded, and so on. Currently the FeedAPI module has an implementation that creates nodes from feeds and feed items, and at the moment Alex is working on a port of the good old Drupal aggregator over to FeedAPI.

We’re especially excited about Aron’s work because we plan to use it to power our team aggregator Managing News, which is currently in private alpha testing and is based on the work we did on The BuzzMonitor with the World Bank. The FeedAPI module will make Managing News more streamlined and dynamic, which is crucial with an tool like this that pulls in and stores so much content. Currently we use the leech module because we needed an aggregator that could create nodes for all feed items because we wanted users to be able to vote and comment on stories pulled into the system. This is one of several features that make the system particularly useful for teams. The FeedAPI module will allow this, and it will give us a lot of other functionality options as well.

Aron’s end goal is to have the FeedAPI module replace the current aggregator and really be the backbone of all future aggregator modules in Drupal, so please test it out and send Aron your feedback, bugs, and suggestions.