SimpleFeed

Build An Aggregation Site With Drupal (Part 1)

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: