My Drupal Blog

Previously...
In Build An Aggregation Site With Drupal (Part 1) and Build An Aggregation Site With Drupal (Part 2) I covered setting up the foundation of your aggregation site using Drupal and SimpleFeed and then using cron to auto-update content and views to create the site sections and RSS feeds for our content.

In this third part of the series I'll look at theming the news items, and finally in part 4 some extra touches including filtering options for our users. You can check out the finished aggregation site (parts 1, 2, and 3) here.

Step 1: Set up the new theme
So far during this tutorial series I've been using a clean install of Drupal with the default Garland theme enabled.

Now that we'll be making various changes to the site's theme it's best to set up a new version of Garland in your site's sites/all/themes folder which you can then enable and edit instead of the default Garland theme (which is located at themes/garland) thus keeping the original Garland theme intact.

Previously...
In Build An Aggregation Site With Drupal (Part 1) I covered setting up the foundation of your aggregation site using Drupal and SimpleFeed. In this second part I'll cover using cron to auto-update content, and then look at using views to create site sections and RSS feeds for our content.

Step 0: Before we start
There is currently one flaw in the SimpleFeed module which we need to correct before continuing. Sometimes taxonomy terms are not assigned automatically to aggregated items, which will stop our site from functioning properly. You can find a more detailed discussion about this issue here.

The good news is that it has been fixed in both the 5.x and 6.x branches and is easy for us to correct :)

Just download the new Drupal 5 version of the updated simplefeed_item.module file from CVS and save it over your current simplefeed_item.module file which you will find in your SimpleFeed module folder (sites/all/modules/simplefeed/simplefeed_item.module).

Step 1: Cron
Adding cron functionality to an aggregation site is pretty crucial because without it our content will not auto-update. We could technically update our feeds manually but that would be a very tedious process, so cron is definitely the way to go!

This tutorial will be split into three parts - part 1 (this part) will explain how to set up the aggregation and import feeds, part 2 (to be published next post) will explain setting up cron to handle auto updating the feeds and will also cover using views to create some different site sections, and part 3 (to be published the post after that) will explain how to theme everything. In the tutorial I will be building a Drupal based sports news aggregation site, but you can obviously tailor this to whatever type of news items you'd like.

The goals:

• Create an aggregation site which aggregates RSS feeds and outputs them in river of news style pages with the most recent news items first.
• Create some different site sections (football and baseball) which only show news items related to that topic.
• Allow users to filter news items by source (e.g. ESPN, BBC etc.).
• Create RSS feeds of our aggregated pages which are available for our users.

You can check out the finished aggregation site (part 1 + part 2) here.

The set up:
For this tutorial I'll be using the following:

• A clean install of Drupal 5.10 (using Garland)
• SimpleFeed 5.x-2.2
• Views 5.x-1.6