Tutorial : Build An Aggregation Site With Drupal

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,

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.

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

A quick word on SimpleFeed vs other aggregation modules:
There are a number of other aggregation modules available for Drupal. From my own experience the two best are SimpleFeed and FeedAPI. FeedAPI has excellent functionality and can do some very cool stuff However, in this case I’ve chosen to use SimpleFeed because I don’t require any of this extra functionality and SimpleFeed is, well, the simplest to use.

Step 1: Set up the site and modules
Set up your Drupal site and then download and install the SimpleFeed module and the Views module. Select the following options for each module:

Step 2: Install the missing simplepie.inc file
In order for SimpleFeed to work correctly it requires that we place the simplepie.inc file from the SimplePie library into our SimpleFeed module directory. If you currently go to your status report (admin/logs/status) you’ll see the following error alerting you to this fact:So, to sort this out do the following

Step 3: Set up a vocabulary
In order to theme our news items more effectively, and to help us with filtering and sorting news items, we’re going to assign taxonomy terms to them. SimpleFeed includes auto-assign functionality for taxonomy terms which will be very helpful here.

First, go to the ‘Add vocabulary’ subsection of the ‘Categories’ admin section (admin/content/taxonomy/add/vocabulary). Then create a vocabulary with the following settings:

·                     Vocabulary name: Source

·                     Types: check ‘Feed’ and ‘Feed Item’

·                     Check ‘Free tagging’

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Courtesy : Motiveminds.com