My Drupal Blog

UPDATE

It appears that I missed the very obvious solution to this problem (!) which, as pointed out by a couple of commenters, is to use the ‘Trim this field to a maximum length’ option within the settings for the node title field.

I’ll leave this post in place as I think it still serves as a useful guide on how to create template override files for views, but please be advised that for implementing truncation of a views node title it is easier to:

• navigate to the view's 'Edit view viewname' page (/admin/build/views/edit/viewname) and click the ‘Node: Title' link
  
• check the ‘Trim this field to a maximum length’ checkbox, and adjust the settings as required
  

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!